Re: instantaneous recall of letter order in alphabet

Oliver Cromm wrote:
* Robin wrote:

I was looking for something in the dictionary and repeating e.g. "lmno"
under my breath... "rstu" when my wife started laughing.

"Don't you *know* n comes after m?"

Well of course I don't, not unless I say the order e.g. "lmnop" [...]
Can anybody else do it, or is it only me?

I know it, and would find using a dictionary tedious without it (I'm at
"limnology", which direction is "lithmus"?) I'd expect that many people
who regularly use big alphabetically ordered collections do.

I'm positive I need to think in order to know at least which letter precedes each (not the reverse, since that is the memorised part). But it really doesn't take any time. In song lyrics, for instance, it gets more complicated. But I'm also positive I need no thinking to know the relative order of two given letters (for more I think I solve it revcursively).

I find the swedish (say) practice of putting modified letters not just after the originals but at the end of the alphabet quite unnerving.
Then there's digraphs, and there we have Lj after Lz. It's defensible in languages in which the digraph/letter doesn't represent a morphological variation of its basis - it's boring to read german dictionaries because of the unedning <sch>s between sb and sd, whereas it's just natural that portuguese doc,aria, doce and doc,ura are close to each other and in that order.

OTOH, no one I asked so far knew instantaneously where the first half of
the alphabet ends. I guess I should ask more librarians.

I've certainly never found it a relevant matter, what with different languages using different letters and all. Surely I have some notion that L is on the first half or middle and O is definitely second half, don't ask me why. I think I divide it in arbitrary groups, A-F, G-H, ....-L (for some reason can't decide I is the beginning of this one), M-N, O-Q (or M-O, P-Q, or M-Q), R-S, T-Z. Oh the intricacies of memory.
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