[netsharc]

Different languages have different keyboards (e.g. QWERTZ or AZERTY). I wonder what problems would happen if we reordered the alphabet...

For one thing the ASCII ordering is now suddenly jumbled up. Maybe our great supreme intellectual leader Elon will issue Magacode to supersede Unicode, kym epcy epc ngy vky yxcohy!

[codetrotter]

Fun fact about character ordering:

Swedish sorting traditionally and officially treated v and w as equivalent, so that users would not have to guess whether the word, or name, they were seeking was spelled with a v or a w. The two letters were often combined in the collating sequence as if they were all v or all w, until 2006 when the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista (The Swedish Academy's Orthographic Dictionary) declared a change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet

[nl]

How is it that Sweden seems dramatically more inclined to make major changes to things most other societies wouldn't touch?

I'm thinking of the Swedish calendar[1] and Högertrafikomläggningen[2] when they switched which side of the road they drove on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar: TL;DR: The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian would reduce by one day, until they finally lined up in 1740... he Great Northern War stopped any further omissions... 1712 had 367 days... 1753... The leap of 11 days was accomplished in one step, with 17 February being followed by 1 March

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

[isoprophlex]

That's pretty interesting, on the face of it its not a bad idea at all to just merge v and w... simplify language without losing much resolution.

although f and v would make more sense in terms of the actual sounds made?

[codetrotter]

> f and v would make more sense in terms of the actual sounds made?

Depends on the language. In German, f and v sound similar. And from your profile description I am guessing you are from the Netherlands, which I guess also might have f and v sound very similar to one-another.

In Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, we have pretty clear distinction between f and v.

[lxgr]

Sorting lists alphabetically would produce vastly different results by language, for one thing.

[wat10000]

Already a thing for some languages. For example, Hawaiian sorts its letters as A, E, I, O, U, H, K, L, M, N, P, W.

[jval43]

Collation rules already differ by locale or language in many programming languages, libraries, and applications.

This is necessary because the order of words or characters is sometimes only sensibly defined if you know the language a text is written in.