"The first record of its existence dates from 1079. It is famous because it is a perfect pangram, containing each character of the Japanese syllabary exactly once. Because of this, it is also used as an ordering for the syllabary, in the same way as the A, B, C, D... sequence of the Latin alphabet."
An interesting example is the zayit stone, a 3000 year old abecedary written in the paleo-Hebrew alphabet. One interesting thing is the changes in the order of the letters.
Well, consider that there are a bunch of poems/psalms in the Bible that use the alphabet as an acrostic (called abecedarian poems). E.g. 9 of the Psalms, chapter 31 of Proverbs, the book of Lamentations.
Consider that although the Bible is completed much later than the Zayit Stone there's not necessarily consistency in the alphabet used in these poems (e.g. Psalm 145 is missing a letter (נ) in the Masoretic text but not in the Dead Sea Scrolls). I recall another example but it's not coming to mind.
So the fixing of the order of the alphabet started as an early process with competing orders. There is some possibility that they might have reordered some of the verses in these acrostic poems to be consistent with what they thought of as the correct order (even though the poet might have worked with a different order). This is mostly conjecture, but it shows something about our desire for order (even if the order is arbitrary), possibly as a teaching aid, and that we might retrofit things to this order.
Yes. I have wondered about similar things. I now truly wonder what the alternate spellings would have been interpreted as. That would have significant implications.
If you're the kind of person who has such abstruse and antiquarian knowledge, like what 'abecedarian' means, off the top of your head and posts about it in public you're also the kind of person who likes to use big words for no good reason. ;) Or at least I am.
