I was wondering if @RenegadeHealer was referring to the 'alphabetical sorting order'.
We may seriously wonder if this ever existed, and even more if we can ever reconstruct it while not yet knowing the meaning of the text.
In general one cannot deduce it from the shape of the characters. Look at Arabic for example, where the same character can have different shapes depending on whether it is preceded or followed by a space.
The special case of q should be considerd too: just imagine it represents an aspiration of the following vowel. In Greek this is represented by a diacritic and plays no role in the sorting.
How to sort cTh etc?
One can make several different ones, and there is no objective way to decide which one is preferable.
Different European languages have different rules for sorting 'ch'. In most, these are two characters to be sorted separately, but in Czech (perhaps only modern Czech?) it is a single unit that has its own place in the alphabet.
As to grouping characters into families, I have an example of that, but I know very well that also here one can make several different ones, and criteria to prefer one or the other are quite subjective (even if they can be formulated).
Many of the long-standing questions have no answer yet.
- Are the strings of e single characters or sequences of characters?
- Is ee like ch ?
We may seriously wonder if this ever existed, and even more if we can ever reconstruct it while not yet knowing the meaning of the text.
In general one cannot deduce it from the shape of the characters. Look at Arabic for example, where the same character can have different shapes depending on whether it is preceded or followed by a space.
The special case of q should be considerd too: just imagine it represents an aspiration of the following vowel. In Greek this is represented by a diacritic and plays no role in the sorting.
How to sort cTh etc?
One can make several different ones, and there is no objective way to decide which one is preferable.
Different European languages have different rules for sorting 'ch'. In most, these are two characters to be sorted separately, but in Czech (perhaps only modern Czech?) it is a single unit that has its own place in the alphabet.
As to grouping characters into families, I have an example of that, but I know very well that also here one can make several different ones, and criteria to prefer one or the other are quite subjective (even if they can be formulated).
Many of the long-standing questions have no answer yet.
- Are the strings of e single characters or sequences of characters?
- Is ee like ch ?