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”.
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.
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? 🤔
Abacus comes from the Greek “Abak” meaning board or slab.
Coincidence. The word backtracks to Greek ᾰ̓́βᾰξ / ábax “board, slab”, it doesn’t have to do with ABC.
- Abaci
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It’s abecedario in Spanish (ABCDs). I’d imagine the -rio is like diccionario, which is like a collection.
It is kind of the same suffix but the story is a mess.
That -ario and all words using it are reborrowed* from Latin. And originally it was two related suffixes, fulfilling two purposes:
- masculine -arius, feminine -aria: transform noun into adjective. Like “a be ce de” (ABCD) into “abecedarius” (alphabetic).
- neuter -arium: noun denoting a place for another noun. Like “dictio” (saying) into “dictionarium” (dictionary, or “where you store sayings”)
Except that Latin allowed you to use an adjective as if it was a noun (Spanish still does it), so that “abecedarius” ended as a substantive again. And Spanish merged Latin masculine and neuter, further conflating both versions of the suffix.
*the inherited doublet is the -ero in llavero (place for keys) and herrero (related to iron - professions took the suffix and systematised the re-substantivisation).
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
yes.
source: can speak Greek.
Also the first two letters of the Greek alphabet are άλφα (alpha) and βήτα (beta)
Azbuka, name of the cirillic script, also comes from the old names of the first two letters.
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.
Yeah
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.
No, it’s named after the cereal
