I never thought of it before, but it is a conjunction of those first two Greek letters. Or else, it’s named after the soup it resembles.
Similarly, the viking rune “alphabet” is called the Futhark, because the first letters are pronounced F, U, Þ, A, R, K.
Wow, I can’t believe I never put that together before.
Shower thought material right there
There’s a series on Prime via The Great Courses Collection about the origins of language. (Almost?) all languages derive their names like this, but that’s like, a throw away line in a much deeper series.
Many Indian languages use some version of ‘akshara’, which means ‘unchanging’ or ‘indestructible’. (I guess the alphabet does change, but too slowly for us to notice.) Most Indian languages start the alphabet with all the vowels, so ‘first n letters’ would be unpronouncable.
Pretty much. English borrowed it from Latin because it’s posh. And Latin borrowed it from Greek because it’s posh. But at the end of the day it’s in the same spirit as “the ABC”, or Latin “abecedarius”.
It’s also “ABC” (“ábécé”) in Hungarian. (And I bet in a lot of other languages too.)
Then why do Abacuses help us count instead of spell? 🤔
- Abaci
Not in greek, it’s abacodes of something but, like octopus, it’s usually just ‘es’ on the end in english.
Coincidence. The word backtracks to Greek ᾰ̓́βᾰξ / ábax “board, slab”, it doesn’t have to do with ABC.
And the Greeks took it from the Phoenicians where it was Alep Bet (almost identical to the Hebrew Aleph Beth).
And these are words that start with the sound of the letter. Aleph means Ox and Beth is house.
No, it’s a noun made from the portmanteau of the first two letters of the greek alphabet
Technically correct
The best kind of correct.
Fun fact - in Polish language the word alfabet exists as a technical name of the alphabet. There is also a more casual word, often used by children: abecadło which is basically polish way of saying “The ABCs”.
Spanish is similar. For spanish the word is abecedario.
We also have alfabeto though.
Finnish word is aakkoset. Well, it has the a. It sounds like a pet name or slang for something, but as far as I know it’s just nonsense.
English has “abecedarian”, which can mean “alphabetical”, “rudimentary”, “elementary”, “novice” or “beginner”.
The Latin word is “abecedarium”. I don’t know why English adopted the Greek word.
I mean, English isn’t a Romance language
True, but it does have a lot of Latinate words.
Not that different from us talking about “learning our ABCs”.
Yeah
No, it’s named after the cereal
Completely wrong as is clearly named after Google parent company Alphabet
I googled alphabet and apparently google got alphabetted 8 years ago?
They had the disadvantage of not being able to read until then, but look how quick they’re moving now.
Yeah. Little known fact, they named their company after their original product, but struggled with how to turn in profit, so they created a Google subsidiary which invented a search engine. True story.
If it isn’t, then where else would the word “alphabet” come from?
Oh wait, you could look at the Hebrew alphabet and pretend that the word came from its first two letters: Aleph and Bet.
This is what I thought. From Hebrew.
In all honesty, I don’t know which of the two languages is older.
Hebrew is slightly older than Greek but it was also more isolated than Greek and likely did not have much influence on Greek. As another commenter pointed out, Phoenician is the accepted source for the Greek alphabet.
I guess that answers that.
From Phoenician actually
From Egyptian Hieroglyphs actually.
Which the Phoenicians turned into letters, which eventually became our letters.
Look, A is a lil upside down cows head hieroglyph.
yes.
source: can speak Greek.
Also the first two letters of the Greek alphabet are άλφα (alpha) and βήτα (beta)
Sounds like a question asked by someone who already knows the answer.
