Who decided to order the English alphabet a through z?

Answer 1

The alphabet from alpha to tau was taken over from a north Semitic alphabet (probably a Phoenician script used in Syria); its introduction to Greece is perhaps reflected in the myth which tells how Cadmus, son of Agenor king of Tyre, brought letters to Thebes, the city he had founded. The shapes of the letters, their names and their order are virtually the same in both alphabets but they do not necessarily represent the same sounds. The Semitic alphabet has no characters for vowels, and the Greek therefore used for its vowels Semitic characters for consonants not in use in Greece. Thus Semitic consonant characters were used for ɑ, ε, o, and ι. The character for upsilon was taken over from a cursive Phoenician script and added to the alphabet after tau. In Greece local variations lasted for centuries. Some dialects had an extra letter, Ϝ, between epsilon and zeta, pronounced like English w and called first 'wau' by the Greeks and later digamma. It disappeared in pre-classical times from the Attic-Ionic dialects and does not appear in the standard alphabet given above. Other letters were added after upsilon to represent the sounds pH and kh.

The Latin alphabet seems to have come from an early form of Etruscan script which was itself derived from the (Euboean) Greek alphabet as used at Cumae (in Campania), a colony of Chalcis in Euboea. The early Latin alphabet was the same as its modern English derivative except that it lacked the letters G, J (for which I did duty), U, W (for which V also served), Y, and Z. The character X represented the sound ks (unlike the Greek X, which represented the sound kh). H represented the aspirate (for its varying significance in Greek see 1 above). Greek gamma was represented by the character C which was at first used for the G sound as well as for the K sound (compare the names Gaius and Gnaeus which when abbreviated were written in archaic fashion C. and Cn.); the character G was introduced in the third century BC.

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Answer 2

The order of the English alphabet, from 'a' through 'z', has evolved over centuries. It is based on the Latin alphabet, which in turn is derived from the Greek alphabet. The specific arrangement of letters within the Latin alphabet was likely developed by scholars and scribes in ancient Rome.