Yaman, and an Order That Is Not Arranged by Sound

Yaman writes the semivowel y and continues the Semitic consonant behind the Hebrew yod, the Syriac yudh and the Arabic ya. Of all the Ge'ez letter names this is among those that have drifted furthest from the inherited form, and no sense is recorded for it here.

Its position is a good place to make a point about the order as a whole. Yaman is the eighteenth letter, and nothing about the sound y explains why it should be eighteenth. The halehame order is inherited, not designed. It was received from the South Arabian tradition and kept, and its sequence records the history of a teaching practice rather than any analysis of the sounds.

That is worth setting beside the Indian alphabets the atlas also holds. The Devanagari order is not inherited but constructed: the Sanskrit phoneticians arranged the letters by where in the mouth each sound is made, running from the throat forwards to the lips, with the vowels first and the sibilants last, and the arrangement is an argument about phonetics laid out as a chart. The Ge'ez order is a tradition, the Devanagari order is a theory, and the two scripts are therefore evidence about quite different things. An alphabet chart looks like the same kind of object in both cases and is not.