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Neat question. I did some searching and found good resources about the history of the alphabet, but very little about why the letters are in that order.
If you want to find out why the letters are in that order, you have to go back to around 2000-4000 B.C. when the roots of the Latin alphabet were being developed. It seems as though the order is the way it is simply because it hasn't changed from the Phoenicians in 1000-2000 B.C. For example, Hebrew is a language far older than Greek and Latin, and their first two letter are aleph and bet, which, in Greek, and later Latin because Alpha Beta (which is where we get the word alphabet), and now 'A' and 'B.' Notice that all western languages have an alphabet in a similar order as each other.
If you do a google search on the history of the alphabet, you can get some really interesting stuff. Here's a decent article I pulled out: http://www.googobits.com/articles/1375-the-origins-and-history-of-the-alphabet.html
If you want to find out why the letters are in that order, you have to go back to around 2000-4000 B.C. when the roots of the Latin alphabet were being developed. It seems as though the order is the way it is simply because it hasn't changed from the Phoenicians in 1000-2000 B.C. For example, Hebrew is a language far older than Greek and Latin, and their first two letter are aleph and bet, which, in Greek, and later Latin because Alpha Beta (which is where we get the word alphabet), and now 'A' and 'B.' Notice that all western languages have an alphabet in a similar order as each other.
If you do a google search on the history of the alphabet, you can get some really interesting stuff. Here's a decent article I pulled out: http://www.googobits.com/articles/1375-the-origins-and-history-of-the-alphabet.html
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