Two Scripts, Two Different Logics – English and Devanagari

History & Culture · Contested

Why write this at all

Most of us learned our alphabet as a memorized chant and never questioned the order again. It feels arbitrary, so we assume it is.

That assumption is worth actually checking — not with opinion, but with one simple, testable question: does the order of a script’s letters match how those sounds are physically made in the mouth, or not?

This piece checks that question against two writing systems: English, and the Devanagari script used for Hindi, Sanskrit, and several other Indian languages. The answer is different for each. It says something about why each script was built — two genuinely different stories, each with real documented history behind it.

A note on sources: this piece draws on secondary and tertiary references — established linguistic overviews and encyclopedic sources — appropriate for an exploratory piece written for general readers. It isn’t a substitute for primary manuscript scholarship, and it doesn’t attempt to resolve genuinely contested academic debates, only to lay out what’s reasonably well established.

First, how sounds are actually made

Before comparing anything, try this out loud. Say these three sounds slowly, one at a time, and pay attention to where the sound happens in your mouth:

• (ka) — the back of your tongue touches the soft part at the very back of the roof of your mouth.
• (cha) — the middle of your tongue touches higher up, near the hard part of the roof of your mouth.
• (ta) — the tip of your tongue touches just behind your upper front teeth.

Notice the pattern: each sound is made a little further forward than the last one. That’s the entire idea behind what linguists call place of articulation — where in the mouth a sound is physically produced. It’s not abstract theory; it’s something you can feel in about ten seconds.

Once you can feel that, the rest of this piece is easy to follow.

A few terms, upfront

A handful of words come up in both case studies below — worth knowing before you hit them, rather than after:

• Manner of articulation — how a sound is produced at a given spot (a quick stop of air, a breathy release, a nasal sound through the nose).
• Voiced / unvoiced — whether your vocal cords vibrate while making the sound (voiced) or not (unvoiced).

The script that’s organized around this

Devanagari groups its consonants using exactly that back-to-front movement. The table below shows the full pattern: each row is a place of articulation, moving from the back of the mouth to the lips. Each column is a manner of articulation — how the airflow and voice are handled at that same spot.

(Retroflex and dental sounds look the same in English spelling but aren’t. Retroflex: tongue curled back, like the “t” in “butter.” Dental: tongue at the teeth, like the (ta) you tried earlier. English uses one letter, t, for both. Devanagari uses two.)

Read down a column and you move from the back of the mouth to the lips. Read across a row and you get the same spot handled four ways, ending in its nasal. Both directions are physical facts about speech — not arbitrary labels.

Where this structure comes from. It traces to the Śikṣā tradition (a branch of ancient Indian scholarship devoted to phonetics, pronunciation, and correct recitation of Sanskrit). These texts, including the Pāṇinīya Śikṣā, describe consonants along three properties: sthāna (place of articulation), karaṇa (the active articulator producing it), and prayatna (the manner or effort — voicing, aspiration, nasality). The table above reflects the two of these that map most directly onto modern phonetic classification — place and manner — the same two axes linguists still use today.

The Pāṇinīya Śikṣā is traditionally attributed to Pāṇini. Scholarship generally treats it as a later work, composed within the tradition that Pāṇini’s own grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī (circa 4th century BCE), presupposes and draws on. Either way, this is among the earliest known instances of a language’s sounds being analyzed this rigorously — and the order it produced is still how Devanagari is arranged today (Wisdomlib, “Pāṇinīya Śikṣā”).

The script that isn’t

English’s A-B-C-D order comes from the Latin alphabet, which comes from the Greek alphabet, which comes from the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn descended from the Proto-Sinaitic script — the earliest known alphabetic writing, generally dated to somewhere between 1900 and 1700 BCE. So it’s worth asking the same question of it: does this order also track where sounds are made in the mouth?

Even a short stretch shows no direction, no repeating pattern, no movement — lips, then throat, then teeth, then vowel, in no discernible order. The full A–Z sequence doesn’t follow a recognizable place-of-articulation pattern either.

Where the letters came from. Decades of scholarship, tracing back to Egyptologist Alan Gardiner’s 1916 decipherment work, show that Proto-Sinaitic letters were built on acrophony — a picture of an object was used to represent the sound that object’s name started with. A drawing of an ox (’alp in the Semitic languages of the time) represented the sound “ah,” and eventually became our letter A. A drawing of a house (bayt) became “b,” and eventually our letter B. This explains where each letter’s sound came from — but not why they were put in this particular order.

Where the order came from. That part is still genuinely unresolved. The leading theory is that the sequence was a mnemonic — a memorized recitation that helped early scribes learn and teach the full set of signs, the same basic function as “A is for Apple” today. Other proposed explanations, discussed in historical-linguistics scholarship, include religious or calendrical schemes and a possible link to a numeral system. None of these theories has to do with articulation, and none has been established as definitively correct — the honest scholarly position is that we don’t know for certain (see citations below).

Two different jobs, not two different qualities

• Devanagari inherited an ordering grounded in phonetic classification — a chart of the mouth, in symbol form, from an ancient Sanskrit tradition that studied speech production directly.
• English’s order was inherited through a long chain of alphabetic traditions, and one leading, unproven theory holds it functioned as a memory aid for scribes — a sequence not organized by place or manner of articulation — and it still works perfectly well as one today.

Neither purpose is more sophisticated than the other. They’re solving different problems, the way a hammer isn’t a worse tool than a wrench for being unable to turn a bolt.

One honest loose end

It’s tempting to say Devanagari’s order is “self-teaching” — that anyone reciting it can feel the mouth-map directly. That’s true of the design. Whether ordinary readers today consciously notice this is a separate question: most people learn the alphabet as a sequence to memorize, the same way English speakers do, rather than being walked explicitly through the articulation logic behind it. The structure is real either way — but how consciously legible it is to everyday readers, versus specialists and students of Sanskrit grammar, is a softer claim this piece doesn’t have direct evidence for.

The takeaway

The interesting part was never which script is smarter. One ordering reflects a remarkably explicit theory of speech, built deliberately from the start. The other inherited a sequence whose original logic remains uncertain — and it belongs to the one billions of people use every day.

In short: Devanagari’s consonant order is a documented phonetic chart of the mouth, built by a scholarly tradition that studied speech directly. English’s A-to-Z order is inherited, still works fine as a memory aid, and its real origin remains genuinely unresolved.

Glossary

• Place of articulation — where in the mouth a sound is physically produced (e.g., back of the throat, front of the mouth, lips).
• Manner of articulation — how the sound is produced at that location (e.g., a quick stop of air, a breathy release, a nasal sound through the nose).
• Voiced / unvoiced — whether your vocal cords vibrate while making the sound (voiced) or not (unvoiced).
• Aspirated — pronounced with an extra puff of air.
• Nasal — air is routed through the nose instead of the mouth.
• Acrophony — naming or representing a letter using a word that begins with the sound it stands for (e.g., a picture of an ox for the sound “ah,” the same logic behind “A is for Apple”).
• Abugida — a writing system (like Devanagari) where each symbol represents a consonant plus a default vowel sound, adjustable with added marks.
• Śikṣā — one of the six traditional Vedāṅgas (ancillary disciplines of Vedic study) devoted to phonetics, pronunciation, and correct recitation of Sanskrit.

Citations

• Wisdomlib, “Pāṇinīya Śikṣā” — on the treatise’s description of consonant articulation by place (sthāna) and articulator (karaṇa), and its traditional attribution to Pāṇini versus his undisputed authorship of the Aṣṭādhyāyī (accessed September 2026).
• Sadhana Sansar, “Sanskrit Consonants — The Structure of Sacred Sound” — on the five-place, five-manner grid and its consistency across all consonant groups (accessed September 2026).
• Wikipedia, “Sanskrit phonology” — on the broader Śikṣā and Prātiśākhya tradition of Sanskrit phonetic analysis (accessed September 2026).
• Britannica, “Devanagari” — on the consonant ordering by place and manner of articulation as used in the modern script (accessed September 2026).
• ScriptSource, “Devanagari (Nagari)” — on the structure of consonant rows and columns (accessed September 2026).
• Wikipedia, “Proto-Sinaitic script” — on Alan Gardiner’s 1916 decipherment and the acrophonic basis of early Semitic letter names (accessed September 2026).
• Rosetta (University of Birmingham), Simons, “Proto-Sinaitic – Progenitor of the Alphabet” — on scholarly debate over the acrophonic basis of Proto-Sinaitic signs (accessed September 2026).
• Mental Floss, “Why Are the Letters in ABC Order?” — on competing historical theories (mnemonic, numeral, and others) for the Phoenician letter sequence (accessed September 2026).
• Judith Flanders, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (Picador, 2020), reviewed in Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America — on the continued historical uncertainty behind the order’s origin (review accessed September 2026).