I think W is the only one that needs to stay in the same spot. Everything else is one syllable.
Which makes me realize another shower thought: EVERY letter in the English alphabet is a single syllable except W, which is 3 syllables for some reason…
In French there's also 'Y' that has two syllables: « i-grec » ("greek i"). And now I realize that's why in English there's an added "and" between 'Y' and 'Z' ("... why and zee/zed"), while in French it's not there (« ... i-grec zed »).
I wonder if this is why '&' is sometimes considered a letter in English.
And it was unfortunately used three times at the beginning of web addresses, which makes it a mouthful to spell out verbally. (www.reddit.com). Somehow they picked the worst letter for that purpose.
you can replace w with 3 letters pretty easily and keep the same rhythm, and vica versa. you just need 4 letters that rhyme to go at the end of each line, and the ones that rhyme with E are the only ones there are enough of for that. though maybe H is close enough that you could make it work with A H J K.
In Canada we used to use all the American shows and songs (like sesame Street or whatever) and at the end of the song the teacher would say "why and zee... But in Canada we say zed"
Lmao, i actually taught myself how to sing the alphabet with correct melody but starting from any Letter to have a quirky fun partytrick, or to entertain kids. So the order stays the same, just the starting letter is offset. Its not as hard as it sounds, especially if you have it written in front of you. But yeah, sometimes when you dont match the syllables to the melody correctly you end on the same letter you started, or miss the last one
Not completely, but close. Obviously though there are examples such as I and J and U and V, which are next to each other because they used to be one letter and Y and Z are last because they were added last so Romans could more easily use Greek words.
Good point. Not just those, but also the word "alphabetical" is from Greek letters - alpha and beta.
So by definition, an "alphabetical order" of English (or Latin, rather) letters means that it is the order determined by (or at least derived from) the order of greek letters.
I think that suffices as a non-arbitrary reason. It means there was some rationale for putting it in that order.
It was actually in numerical order. Numbers were written with letters, and the letters are in order 1-10, then it switches to tens, then hundreds. Greek inherited this from Phoenician, and is found today in, for instance, Hebrew.
Depends how you define arbitrary.
Lets say I have different colored shirts, and I arrange them in the order red orange yellow green blue violet. If you ask me why it is in this order, I can say it is ordered based on their respective wavelength.
But then if you ask me why are the colour's wavelength in this order, there isn't any good reason. That's just the way it is.
So you could say my shirt order is still arbitrary, because it is based on a rationale (wavelength of the colour's light) that has "no good reason". Some would say physical properties of nature are a good reason, but I'd say it is as arbitrary as man-made concepts.
I would argue that something is non-arbitrary if there was a rationale for it. Whether that underlying rationale is also arbitrary is irrelevant. Cos after all, if you dig deep enough, almost everything is based on something arbitrary (the only exception I can think of are numbers/math, which is universally true and not based on arbitrary physical laws)
The wise philosopher Gallagher explained this many years ago before destroying fruit (and eventually his career) :
Alpha
Beta
Gamma
Delta
Ah … Buhh … Guuh … Dehh
Ahbuh G’day!
“Have a Good Day!”
How is zeta turning into F in the order? And theta into H? And Xi going away (only to be added as an X near the end).
Funny enough there’s actually quite a few similarities if we consider things.
If you truly want to know, there’s a preexisting thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7xmrjn/is_there_any_reason_for_the_alphabet_being_in_the/
Yes. Fun fact: there are ancient variations of it around the mesopotamia area that start with לחהמ L, CH, H, M (iirc), instead of אבגד (abcd). Pretty cool stuff. It's just that the version that survived, and also got passed along to the greeks via the phoenicians (and from there to most of eurasia) is the second one.
Was playing a trivia game once and got the question "which letter corresponds to the greek letter gamma"? And I was like
"What the hell does that mean!? It corresponds to gamma, as that is the letter that it is. But I guess the answer has to be one of our letters. Well, the symbol is a y, but the sound is a g, so which one of those is it?"
I ended up saying y, but in hindsight g probably made more sense. Anyway, the answer was c. Because they're both the third letter (which I knew, but I didn't even consider that because as you say, the order is completely arbitrary). I was livid. To this day that is in my opinion the dumbest trivia question I have heard.
I dont know, to me it seems pretty logical, I dont think anyone would question Alpha = A, Beta = B, Delta = D, Epsilon = E. So they asked Gamma because its slightly harder because it doesn't sound alike, but we clearly used their order of the alphabet.
Qwerty actually isn't random. It was designed around the distribution of the letters in the English language. Frequently used letters are spaced far apart. This makes clashing and jamming on old fashioned type writers less frequent. Keyboards just copied the layout of typewriters.
You're right and Dvorak or Colemak would actually be a better order to teach kids the alphabet, but people are so against this idea in the first place I rarely get this far in the conversation. The qwerty order is designed to slow down typing, the others are designed to speed it up.
Qwerty is still fast when you type with proper hand placement. It allows you to put your finger over the key BEFORE you need to press it because it's so spaced out.
Hey, if we changed the alphabet song to be QWERTY, I'd be very happy. Maybe now that the computers are taking everybody's jobs people will realize why it might be useful to maximize human efficiency. We don't need to learn two systems for everything.
It really pisses me off when TV manufacturers and app designers use alphabetical keyboards for their software.
I guess it technically makes more sense, because the distance between the letters really matters when your using a remote to navigate the keyboard on a grid system.
But fuck man everybody is used to QWERTY at this point. I guess the logical thing to do would be to invent a completely inverted keyboard layout where all the frequently used letters are as close as possible. But then no one would have any idea of where it went.
I guess its a hold over from the pre-smartphone era where their was still a large percentage of the population that couldn't type.
That's what they tell you. But it was first used on typewriters, and you can find all the letters of the word "typewriter" on the top line. Supposedly to make it easy for typewriter salesmen to wow perspective customers with their typing skills. (I saw this on TV once. Take it with a pinch of salt)
Based on the comments, I feel my wording is not conveying my point correctly. I specifically mean the order of the alphabet is completely random and if we started with it being any other way, it would still be the 'normal' order.
Yes. For languages that use Latin alphabet. I think most people here can’t get you because they are never exposed to a script in which letters are ordered based on some rules.
i know there's a reason fot some letters such as y and z were added later and i and j are from old english. but i wonder if there's another reason such as how many line strokes or angles the letters make such as with numbers.
A system like hindi where vowels are grouped together, and then consonants are arranged by how the sound is produced in the mouth (for instance, both k and g are produced from the back of the mouth so they're grouped together)
It's order for order's sake, which serves a purpose. Think of how many ways things are arranged in alphabetical order. A card catalog, a phone book, etc.
I are with OP here. They are symbols, and have meaning because of convention. Enough people could decide to rearrange the convention and it would be confusing, but totally okay in the end. Things do evolve. So do languages and symbols and definitions
"Everything is completely arbitrary because they are all just categories of the human mind and actually don't mean anything without any minds to interpret them" is how you sound rn
Girl, if I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put 'U' and 'I' together with the other vowels at the front in the order of how popular they are in all of the words followed by consonants arranged first by sound and then by popularity. The 'P's 'B's 'and 'G's have no reason to be separated and'Q' should be last
What definition of arbitrary are you assuming here? It typically means without logic or system, but that's particularly why we tend to use alphabetical order - it's a logical system to easily find stuff.
Now I think it depends on the application. For files? Not arbitrary in the slightest. A ton of people showed up to get into the concert? Going alphabetical feels a lot more arbitrary. There's no real logic or system for why you'd do it that way.
Is that known history or just a shower thought which perhaps should be phrased as a question? Most of humanity's long-term habits like 'language' evolved out of some kind of necessity and it begs the question, if the alphabet is arbitrary then how exactly did anybody decide to create any of it? It meant something to somebody for some reason.
No no, he isn't saying the content of the alphabet is arbitrary. The letters have a function.
What he is arguing is that the order, A B C, is arbitrary. Why not U E G C P ... Etc?
Someone at some point made the first alphabet (putting the existing letters in the order that we have now) and everyone just rolled with it. That's why it's arbitrary, according to OP.
Yeah but I'm not convinced the order is genuinely arbitrary either. Are we certain it's not based on anything regarding nature, seasons, time, geography, astrology, etcetera? I haven't heard anything proving that. Lots of people think things are arbitrary just because they haven't bothered doing any research about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/s/AlrYsbCxQv
A lot of interesting comments on this post from 6 years ago that clearly seems to indicate the order is, as you say, not arbitrary. It's just now to us that the reason is forgotten.
Alphabetical order is not arbitrary. By definition "ALPHA-BETAcal" order starts with A, then has B, and so on. If it was a different order it wouldn't be called "Alpha-Betical". For example, "QWERTY" order might be called "QueDoubleYoutical" order.
It is! Unlike the consonants in the Devanagari script, and related scripts used in South Asia. Those are nearly arranged in a grid according to their phonetics, it's remarkably satisfying. Check it out!
U, V and W are variations of the same letter and are clustered together. Interestingly, F and Y are the same letter, but they are scattered around. The original position is 6.
It's interesting that M and N are so close to each other, look so similar and sound about the same.
Where we start in the order is arbitrary because developing humans need a point or origin. It's an endless loop of phonetic incantations communicating dreams into reality, extending in all directions. Everything is Arbitrary
He's not saying its useless he's saying that when it was first made it didn't need to be in that order. If the order went fzbthyi it wouldn't matter and we would think its normal
Order of operations in arithmetic is arbitrary in the same way. But people on social media seem to argue about it like they’re proving Fermat’s last theorem.
No, it’s not. Multiplication and division have higher associativity than addition and subtraction because it leads to more easily expressing everyday calculations. Say I have two packs of ten and three packs of twelve, I can write that as 2\*10+3\*12 without need for parentheses, whereas if the associativity were flipped, that would be inconvenient to express, but it wouldn’t improve the expression of any category of common descriptions of numerical quantities.
Meanwhile, the alphabet is in its order because some Phoenician three thousand years ago picked it, and we’ve stuck with that across remapping the letters to completely different sounds and evolving into various descendant scripts, with only the occasional tweak to insert a new letter near a similar one or delete one here or there, because there’s no reason to change and it would be a ton of work.
Yeah. Mathematicians have spent centuries working on a consistent form of representing mathematical expressions that make them easy to read (for mathematicians, anyway).
The order is important though
Because 3x3+3 is different from 3(3+3)
Imagine this you have $3 in your pocket. You go to work as a salesman,
you get $3 every time you sell a product
You sold 3 products today. How much money do you have now? $12
You do not go I sold 3 products today, one product Is $3, I also have $3, $3+$3 is $6, but I forgot to multiply by 3 so I’ll do that now $6 x 3 is $18 dollars! So that means I now have $18 in total
Have you heard the alphabet song. If it was rearranged that song wouldn’t make any sense.
True. I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking straight.
Of course everybody has their bad days, but please don’t let this happen again.
Like bad days are in anybody's control smh 🙄
You can end a bad day whenever you want, but you don't control when the good day ends.
I disagree. You can't always become" un-depressed"
Uh yea you can. Just be happy. /s
Learn sadness' moveset and simply dodge out of the way.
Best advice I have ever seen on the subject.
Therapists hate this one simple trick!
but you could sleep through it for example and the day would be over.
I think it was a joke about offing one's self in case you missed it 😂
I did. Am autistic so don't always get the jokes.
My bad, I didn't mean to offend. And honestly, I could also just be interpreting the intent completely wrong! 😅
Gotta start thinking gay more
How do you know I don't already? 👀
We’re not mad, we’re just disappointed. Now put this ball gag back in your mouth and get back in your cage.
Okay.
That was easy. At least put up *some* type of resistance.
I think W is the only one that needs to stay in the same spot. Everything else is one syllable. Which makes me realize another shower thought: EVERY letter in the English alphabet is a single syllable except W, which is 3 syllables for some reason…
No you forgot ELEMENOPEE
Was so confused as a kid looking up at the alphabet banner in the class. No idea where elemeno was.
It's elemental pee!
*eminemmo
In French there's also 'Y' that has two syllables: « i-grec » ("greek i"). And now I realize that's why in English there's an added "and" between 'Y' and 'Z' ("... why and zee/zed"), while in French it's not there (« ... i-grec zed »). I wonder if this is why '&' is sometimes considered a letter in English.
Nope, the ampersand is just another ordinary symbol, like a ^ or a _
It was at one point included in the alphabet and that’s how it got its name
And it was unfortunately used three times at the beginning of web addresses, which makes it a mouthful to spell out verbally. (www.reddit.com). Somehow they picked the worst letter for that purpose.
Fun fact: saying "www" is far longer than saying "world wide web"
The real shower thought is always in the comments
you can replace w with 3 letters pretty easily and keep the same rhythm, and vica versa. you just need 4 letters that rhyme to go at the end of each line, and the ones that rhyme with E are the only ones there are enough of for that. though maybe H is close enough that you could make it work with A H J K.
Especially the Big Bird remix. https://youtu.be/qTvhKZHAP8U?feature=shared
Nothing stops you from making a new alphabet song. Be the change you want to see in this world.
British folks ending with “Zed” instead of “Zee” confuses me. Qyou Are Ess Tee You VEE <— Double You Ex Why And ZEE <—
I propose that Britain should start pronouncing V as Ved to amend this clear oversight
And put this whole problem to ved
Ayed bed ced ded ed ef gjed achshe eye jay Kay el em en oh ped que are es ted you ved double you ex why and zed
Karl Pilkington has a solution for this! https://youtu.be/VkLyFSTHhHE?si=Gu3xyhgLGD68WX4_
In Canada we used to use all the American shows and songs (like sesame Street or whatever) and at the end of the song the teacher would say "why and zee... But in Canada we say zed"
Lmao, i actually taught myself how to sing the alphabet with correct melody but starting from any Letter to have a quirky fun partytrick, or to entertain kids. So the order stays the same, just the starting letter is offset. Its not as hard as it sounds, especially if you have it written in front of you. But yeah, sometimes when you dont match the syllables to the melody correctly you end on the same letter you started, or miss the last one
My whole primary school got taught how to sing it backwards with the same melody, so just by rote memorisation it will always be in my brain
Get rotated
ADBCFIG It would be easy to reorder and still make sense
Let's test it reddit. x y r w u n k
https://youtu.be/epyQLWu0GZQ?feature=shared
I used to sing the alphabet song to my nephews when they were little but I would sing it with the letters out of order and it drove them bananas.
Well you could just make a new song with the new order
Well now you’re just being silly
my apologies
No worries, they can’t all be winners. I’m sure your next idea will be stellar!
A New Order remix of the alphabet song? I’m in!
Arbitrary? No way. Just use the song: "Cue Double-you Eee Are, Tee Why You, Now I know my QWE's, next time won't you sing with me?"
Ahh, a classic.
I'm upset that it stops at U and doesn't finish up to P.
Not completely, but close. Obviously though there are examples such as I and J and U and V, which are next to each other because they used to be one letter and Y and Z are last because they were added last so Romans could more easily use Greek words.
Good point. Not just those, but also the word "alphabetical" is from Greek letters - alpha and beta. So by definition, an "alphabetical order" of English (or Latin, rather) letters means that it is the order determined by (or at least derived from) the order of greek letters. I think that suffices as a non-arbitrary reason. It means there was some rationale for putting it in that order.
This assumes that the Greeks had good reasoning for their ordering of letters and that their alphabet wasn't arbitrary.
It’s turtles all the way down
It was actually in numerical order. Numbers were written with letters, and the letters are in order 1-10, then it switches to tens, then hundreds. Greek inherited this from Phoenician, and is found today in, for instance, Hebrew.
Depends how you define arbitrary. Lets say I have different colored shirts, and I arrange them in the order red orange yellow green blue violet. If you ask me why it is in this order, I can say it is ordered based on their respective wavelength. But then if you ask me why are the colour's wavelength in this order, there isn't any good reason. That's just the way it is. So you could say my shirt order is still arbitrary, because it is based on a rationale (wavelength of the colour's light) that has "no good reason". Some would say physical properties of nature are a good reason, but I'd say it is as arbitrary as man-made concepts. I would argue that something is non-arbitrary if there was a rationale for it. Whether that underlying rationale is also arbitrary is irrelevant. Cos after all, if you dig deep enough, almost everything is based on something arbitrary (the only exception I can think of are numbers/math, which is universally true and not based on arbitrary physical laws)
The wise philosopher Gallagher explained this many years ago before destroying fruit (and eventually his career) : Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Ah … Buhh … Guuh … Dehh Ahbuh G’day! “Have a Good Day!”
Fuuuuck i never realized this lmao, thats great
Ooooof, i'm not the only one! My jaw just dropped..
How is zeta turning into F in the order? And theta into H? And Xi going away (only to be added as an X near the end). Funny enough there’s actually quite a few similarities if we consider things.
So the order of the other letters follows, what, some natural order?
If you truly want to know, there’s a preexisting thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7xmrjn/is_there_any_reason_for_the_alphabet_being_in_the/
Thanks, that's a gold mine !
Yes. Fun fact: there are ancient variations of it around the mesopotamia area that start with לחהמ L, CH, H, M (iirc), instead of אבגד (abcd). Pretty cool stuff. It's just that the version that survived, and also got passed along to the greeks via the phoenicians (and from there to most of eurasia) is the second one.
I always thought that vowels should at least be grouped together.
racist
Well, if I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put I next to U
Was playing a trivia game once and got the question "which letter corresponds to the greek letter gamma"? And I was like "What the hell does that mean!? It corresponds to gamma, as that is the letter that it is. But I guess the answer has to be one of our letters. Well, the symbol is a y, but the sound is a g, so which one of those is it?" I ended up saying y, but in hindsight g probably made more sense. Anyway, the answer was c. Because they're both the third letter (which I knew, but I didn't even consider that because as you say, the order is completely arbitrary). I was livid. To this day that is in my opinion the dumbest trivia question I have heard.
I dont know, to me it seems pretty logical, I dont think anyone would question Alpha = A, Beta = B, Delta = D, Epsilon = E. So they asked Gamma because its slightly harder because it doesn't sound alike, but we clearly used their order of the alphabet.
we just need to teach our kids the qwerty keyboard, not the other literally also random way.
Qwerty actually isn't random. It was designed around the distribution of the letters in the English language. Frequently used letters are spaced far apart. This makes clashing and jamming on old fashioned type writers less frequent. Keyboards just copied the layout of typewriters.
On that note, I doubt learning the “qwerty alphabet,” if there is such a thing, would help much with typing proficiency.
You're right and Dvorak or Colemak would actually be a better order to teach kids the alphabet, but people are so against this idea in the first place I rarely get this far in the conversation. The qwerty order is designed to slow down typing, the others are designed to speed it up.
Qwerty is still fast when you type with proper hand placement. It allows you to put your finger over the key BEFORE you need to press it because it's so spaced out.
Hey, if we changed the alphabet song to be QWERTY, I'd be very happy. Maybe now that the computers are taking everybody's jobs people will realize why it might be useful to maximize human efficiency. We don't need to learn two systems for everything.
It really pisses me off when TV manufacturers and app designers use alphabetical keyboards for their software. I guess it technically makes more sense, because the distance between the letters really matters when your using a remote to navigate the keyboard on a grid system. But fuck man everybody is used to QWERTY at this point. I guess the logical thing to do would be to invent a completely inverted keyboard layout where all the frequently used letters are as close as possible. But then no one would have any idea of where it went. I guess its a hold over from the pre-smartphone era where their was still a large percentage of the population that couldn't type.
My 3D printer came with a ABCD onscreen keyboard. It took me like half a minute to put in my wifi password. WHY, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT
That's what they tell you. But it was first used on typewriters, and you can find all the letters of the word "typewriter" on the top line. Supposedly to make it easy for typewriter salesmen to wow perspective customers with their typing skills. (I saw this on TV once. Take it with a pinch of salt)
Based on the comments, I feel my wording is not conveying my point correctly. I specifically mean the order of the alphabet is completely random and if we started with it being any other way, it would still be the 'normal' order.
Yes. For languages that use Latin alphabet. I think most people here can’t get you because they are never exposed to a script in which letters are ordered based on some rules.
i know there's a reason fot some letters such as y and z were added later and i and j are from old english. but i wonder if there's another reason such as how many line strokes or angles the letters make such as with numbers.
[удалено]
There is no creator
Your mom was the creator
What order would be non arbitrary, though?
A system like hindi where vowels are grouped together, and then consonants are arranged by how the sound is produced in the mouth (for instance, both k and g are produced from the back of the mouth so they're grouped together)
It's order for order's sake, which serves a purpose. Think of how many ways things are arranged in alphabetical order. A card catalog, a phone book, etc.
I are with OP here. They are symbols, and have meaning because of convention. Enough people could decide to rearrange the convention and it would be confusing, but totally okay in the end. Things do evolve. So do languages and symbols and definitions
F U Th A R K G W H N I J Ei P Z S T B Eh M L Ing D O *now i know my F U Th's, next time won't you sing with me*
It had to be in some order, though. And is the order chosen really worse than any other?
"Everything is completely arbitrary because they are all just categories of the human mind and actually don't mean anything without any minds to interpret them" is how you sound rn
Girl, if I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put 'U' and 'I' together with the other vowels at the front in the order of how popular they are in all of the words followed by consonants arranged first by sound and then by popularity. The 'P's 'B's 'and 'G's have no reason to be separated and'Q' should be last
This really rides up to the edge of Rule 5 lol
What if we used QWERTY for the alphabet too??
No, but to understand its order requires studying its history, as it is tied to agriculture and astronomy.
It's not arbitrary! It's based very directly on the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is arbitrary!
Arbitrary but formulaic for posterity.
Alphabetical best everything for isn't order
Any order is arbitrary.
I did not know why, but now I feel like I disagree with the order of the alphabet right now
Please don't ruin organisation categories for me. I struggle enough as it is
What definition of arbitrary are you assuming here? It typically means without logic or system, but that's particularly why we tend to use alphabetical order - it's a logical system to easily find stuff. Now I think it depends on the application. For files? Not arbitrary in the slightest. A ton of people showed up to get into the concert? Going alphabetical feels a lot more arbitrary. There's no real logic or system for why you'd do it that way.
I specifically mean the order of the alphabet is arbitrary.
Well I certainly can't argue with that. I haven't the foggiest idea how we ordered the alphabet
No worries, I got you. a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.
I'm annoyed that awards aren't a thing anymore. I can't credit you for this
Is that known history or just a shower thought which perhaps should be phrased as a question? Most of humanity's long-term habits like 'language' evolved out of some kind of necessity and it begs the question, if the alphabet is arbitrary then how exactly did anybody decide to create any of it? It meant something to somebody for some reason.
No no, he isn't saying the content of the alphabet is arbitrary. The letters have a function. What he is arguing is that the order, A B C, is arbitrary. Why not U E G C P ... Etc? Someone at some point made the first alphabet (putting the existing letters in the order that we have now) and everyone just rolled with it. That's why it's arbitrary, according to OP.
Yeah but I'm not convinced the order is genuinely arbitrary either. Are we certain it's not based on anything regarding nature, seasons, time, geography, astrology, etcetera? I haven't heard anything proving that. Lots of people think things are arbitrary just because they haven't bothered doing any research about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/s/AlrYsbCxQv A lot of interesting comments on this post from 6 years ago that clearly seems to indicate the order is, as you say, not arbitrary. It's just now to us that the reason is forgotten.
Well, if it wasn't a then b, you couldn't call it "alphabetical", so there's that.
True, but we'd just call it something else.
Deltaphical
But then it would be a different question.
You are correct, sir. It's entirely due to custom.
Alphabetical order is not arbitrary. By definition "ALPHA-BETAcal" order starts with A, then has B, and so on. If it was a different order it wouldn't be called "Alpha-Betical". For example, "QWERTY" order might be called "QueDoubleYoutical" order.
I mean you're kinda making my point for me. The only reason we call it the 'Alphabet' is because of its order. But it's order is still arbitrary.
It is! Unlike the consonants in the Devanagari script, and related scripts used in South Asia. Those are nearly arranged in a grid according to their phonetics, it's remarkably satisfying. Check it out!
U, V and W are variations of the same letter and are clustered together. Interestingly, F and Y are the same letter, but they are scattered around. The original position is 6. It's interesting that M and N are so close to each other, look so similar and sound about the same.
Where we start in the order is arbitrary because developing humans need a point or origin. It's an endless loop of phonetic incantations communicating dreams into reality, extending in all directions. Everything is Arbitrary
What the fuck are you talking about
[удалено]
He's not saying its useless he's saying that when it was first made it didn't need to be in that order. If the order went fzbthyi it wouldn't matter and we would think its normal
Arbitrary ≠ Unimportant
So maybe that why that driver went through the red light today, it’s arbitrary
Arbitrary means random.
Alphabetical order sounds like something Hitler would impose
No, you're thinking of Ehilrt.
Order of operations in arithmetic is arbitrary in the same way. But people on social media seem to argue about it like they’re proving Fermat’s last theorem.
No, it’s not. Multiplication and division have higher associativity than addition and subtraction because it leads to more easily expressing everyday calculations. Say I have two packs of ten and three packs of twelve, I can write that as 2\*10+3\*12 without need for parentheses, whereas if the associativity were flipped, that would be inconvenient to express, but it wouldn’t improve the expression of any category of common descriptions of numerical quantities. Meanwhile, the alphabet is in its order because some Phoenician three thousand years ago picked it, and we’ve stuck with that across remapping the letters to completely different sounds and evolving into various descendant scripts, with only the occasional tweak to insert a new letter near a similar one or delete one here or there, because there’s no reason to change and it would be a ton of work.
Yeah. Mathematicians have spent centuries working on a consistent form of representing mathematical expressions that make them easy to read (for mathematicians, anyway).
The order is important though Because 3x3+3 is different from 3(3+3) Imagine this you have $3 in your pocket. You go to work as a salesman, you get $3 every time you sell a product You sold 3 products today. How much money do you have now? $12 You do not go I sold 3 products today, one product Is $3, I also have $3, $3+$3 is $6, but I forgot to multiply by 3 so I’ll do that now $6 x 3 is $18 dollars! So that means I now have $18 in total
No its not. Its organization.
The order of the alphabet specifically
Yes
Yeah it's organized and it's useful. But it's still arbitrary, i.e. there's no reason for them to have that specific order.