Orderings of alphabets

(Warning: there is no point to this post! Then again, I suppose that holds for virtually all of the posts here.)

I was reading something by Prof. Paul Kiparsky the other day about Pāṇini, the brilliant Sanskrit grammarian whose Aṣṭādhyāyī is essentially a complete generative grammar for the language, which mentioned that the entire Pāṇinian edifice rests on the grammarians' penetrative analysis of the Sanskrit phoneme inventory. Now, anyone who knows any Indic script (with the qualified exception of Tamil) knows that the alphabetic arrangement of letters is highly systematic, classifying the main consonants into a 5 x 5 array based on five points and five modes of articulation. However, Pāṇini does not use this arrangement, instead using the arrangement of the akṣarasamāmnāya, also known as the Śivasūtras. These are fourteen sūtras (lit., "threads", meaning something like "aphorism"), arranged in the following peculiar fashion:

1. a i u Ṇ
2. ṛ ḷ K
3. e o Ṅ
4. ai au C
5. h y v r Ṭ
6. l Ṇ
7. ñ m ṅ ṇ n M
8. jh bh Ñ
9. gh ḍh dh Ṣ
10. j b g ḍ d Ś
11. kh ph ch ṭh th c ṭ t V
12. k p Y
13. ś ṣ s R
14. h L

The minuscule letters represent the actual sounds of Sanskrit, while the majuscule letters are what are known as anubandhas (lit. "tie, attachment, connection", meaning "indicator(y letter)" in the Pāṇinian context). This paper, also by Prof. Kiparsky, does a much better job of arranging the Śivasūtras into an array that also brings out the phonemic logic in the arrangement. Prof. Kiparsky's paper also tries to flesh out an argument that explains why the Śivasūtras have the shape they do (his main point is that this arrangement is particularly conducive to the economy of expression so prized by Sanskrit grammarians that it was said ardha-mātrā-lāghavena putrôtsavaṃ manyante vaiyākaraṇāḥ (roughly, "The grammarians celebrate the economizing of half a mora like the birth of a son") ).

<UPDATE>

This article has more information on the working of Pāṇinian grammar, and in particular draws attention to the "background material", so to speak, that Pāṇini assumes a working knowledge of: the phonology of Sanskrit (the aforementioned akṣarasamāmnāya), the verbal roots classified by their conjugation in the present system (the dhātu-pāṭha), and non-verbal nominal and pronominal bases (the gaṇa-pāṭha, a somewhat confusing name since the verbal conjugation classes are also called gaṇas). Inflectional morphology (the suP case markers and the tiṄ verbal conjugations) and derivational morphology (the primary derivational, or kṛt, and and the secondary derivational, or taddhita, affixes) then apply to the bases found in the gaṇa-pāṭha.

</UPDATE>

Anyway, while I was looking up more details about the Śivasūtras online, I came across the interesting fact that the current Japanese ordering of the kana syllabary, called gojūon ("fifty characters"), was inspired by the very sensible conventional Sanskrit order. Prior to this, a poetic pangram was used to organize the syllabary into an order. According to Wikipedia, the poem, called iroha, was:

(in modern Japanese writing, a mixture of kanji and hiragana)

色は匂へど

散りぬるを

我が世誰ぞ

常ならむ

有為の奥山

今日越えて

浅き夢見じ

酔ひもせず

(in pure hiragana)

いろはにほへと

ちりぬるを

わかよたれそ

つねならむ

うゐのおくやま

けふこえて

あさきゆめみし

ゑひもせす

(archaic pronunciation in Roman transliteration)

iro ha ni ho he to

chi ru nu ru wo

wa ka yo ta re so

tsu ne na ra mu

u wi no o ku ya ma

ke fu ko e te

a sa ki yu me mi shi

we hi mo se su

I must add that I can read neither kanji nor kana! The poem was translated thus by Prof. Ryūichi Abe at Harvard—

Although its scent still lingers on,

        the form of a flower has scattered away.

For whom will the glory

         of this world remain unchanged?

Arriving today at the yonder side

        of the deep mountains of evanescent existence

We shall never allow ourselves to drift away

        intoxicated, in the world of shallow dreams.

This ordering of hiragana is apparently still used in Japan to represent numbers in some formal contexts, something like the old abjad order of the Arabic alphabet. (Not that I can read Arabic either!) While the modern sequence in Arabic is almost entirely based, at least as far as I can tell, on the orthographic resemblances of the letters, the old abjad order was an extension of the order of the Phoenician alphabet (which also influenced the Greek and Roman orders). This older ordering is only typically used for enumeration, and I think Orhan Pamuk uses it in My Name is Red to number the many triplets of anecdotes narrated by the characters. I have vague memories of learning this order in Dubai, but this is just what I found online, cross-checked against Wikipedia:

أ ب ج د ه و ز ح ط ي ك ل م ن س ع ف ص ق ر ش ت ث خ ذ ض ظ غ

read:

أبْجَدْ هوَّزْ حُطِّي كَلَمَنْ سعْفَصْ قَرَشَتْ ثَخَذْ ضَظَغْ

I don't know why the alphabet is parsed in this manner, but I do recall that Hebrew still follows the abjad order. (Not that I can read Hebrew either!)

<UPDATE>

I quickly ran through the English alphabet in my head, contrasting it with the abjad order. It's fascinating to see clusters of letters that still correspond in order to clusters in the Arabic order: A-B-(C)-D, K-L-M-N, Q-R-S-T.

</UPDATE>