The alphabet itself was the invention of ancient days, yet alphabetic order was the organizing principle that ushered in, and made possible, the modern world.
Without alphabetic order, all the knowledge in the world would lie in great unsifted stacks of books, unfindable, unread, unknown.Ī Place for Everything traces the beginnings of alphabetization, as we understand it, moving from the development of what was, in effect, a sixteenth-century proto-card catalogue, to a London bookseller who made a revolutionary breakthrough when he alphabetized his books, not by lumping all the ‘Thomases’ together (Thomas More, Thomas Smith, Thomas Elyot), but by ‘sirname’. Alphabetic order allows us to locate the information we need, and disseminate it further. While we emphasize our subconscious appreciation for the importance of the alphabet, it is alphabetic order, its organization, that allows us to sift through the centuries of thought, of knowledge, of poetry, literature, scientific discovery and discourse. Flanders organises her book alphabetically (A is for …, B is for …, and so on), but jumps from I (index cards) to Y (Y2K) for a sort of epilogue on the twilight of the alphabet.A Place for Everything.
These thoughts come to mind while reading social historian Judith Flanders’ new book, A Place for Everything, in which she explores the development and dominance of alphabetic order in Western Europe and the United States from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. Language was power, and ‘alphabetic order’ proved not to be neutral.
But in what order did those fabulous syllables go? Sequoyah provided a chart, but the missionary Samuel Worcester quickly rearranged it to suit English alphabetic order. Sequoyah’s system – properly a syllabary rather than an alphabet, in that it represents the eighty-five syllables used in Cherokee – is fascinating, innovative, and remains in use today. In the early nineteenth century, Sequoyah, a Cherokee man living in Alabama, developed a fundamentally new system of writing Cherokee, which had until then not been a written language.
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