Alphabetized Alphabet

There is a problem with the alphabet: it’s in the wrong order.

The first letter of the alphabet, supposedly, is A. Yet, as Twitter user @rfglenn pointed out, if you look at how the letters themselves are spelled, A (or Ay) shouldn’t come before Aitch or Arr, since their second letters, aI and aR, come before aY in the alphabet. So @rfglenn re-alphabetized the alphabet: Aitch Arr Ay, Bee Cue Dee, DoubleEwe Ecks, Ee Eff Ell, and so forth.

But @rfglenn’s alphabet still had a problem: it had been alphabetized using the old alphabet. It began Aitch, Arr, Ay— H, R, A. But with THIS alphabetization, R should have come first, before H, because the R in Arr now comes before I in Aitch. Though it had been reordered, the very process of that reordering had invalidated the new order.

Chaos reigned.

I sought to solve this problem definitively, by recursively re-alphabetizing the alphabet until it reached a state of equilibrium where the current order reflected itself. I created a simple Python script that iterated through each alphabetization, using the prior sequence as a guide, until the new and old were the same.

A snapshot of the recursive alphabetizer.

Luckily for my computer’s processor, this program reached equilibrium in just three sorts.

In the second sort, R (Arr) took its rightful place above H (Aitch); Y (Why) rocketed up to join W (Double Ewe), while Q (Cue) plummeted deep below C (See).

In the third sort, I (Eye) and Q (Cue) made jumps, H (Aitch) traded down once more with A (Ay), but the rest remained mainly the same.

And in the fourth sort, no change was needed. The alphabet had righted itself. The world was, once again, at peace.

Recursion sequence, showing how each letter rose or fell from the previous recursion.

The recursively re-alphabetized alphabet is beautiful. It is perfect in its sequence, an unassailable beacon of order in these increasingly chaotic times. You can even still sing it to the same old tune. What could be more important, more essential, than that the foundations of our language be, themselves, well-founded? It’s good for language to follow its own rules… right?

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Alphabetized Alphabet

r       arr	
a       ay	
h       aitch	
b       bee	
d       dee	
    w       double ewe	
y       why	
u       ewe	
i       eye	
e       ee	
f       eff	
l       ell	
m       emm	
n       enn	
s       ess	
x       ecks	
c       see	
q       cue	
g       gee	
j       jay	
k       kay	
o       oh	
p       pee	
t       tee	
v       vee	
z       zee	

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Have some chaos that needs ordering?