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The Structural Invariance of Alphabetic Sequence: Macro-Segmental Topology and the Laryngeal-Vocalic Axis Across Three Millennia

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The linear sequence of the West Semitic abecedary has demonstrated continuous diachronic stability for over three millennia, persisting from Late Bronze Age Ugaritic through Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek, Gothic, and Church Slavonic. While recent quantitative formulations, such as the Collapsed Syllabary Order (CSO) model, propose that alphabetic order reflects the rank-frequency of consonant-vowel syllabic tokens, empirical token distributions diverge sharply across recipient languages and textual corpora. This study demonstrates that the alphabet is organized not as a continuous chain of discrete graphemes, but as a three-tiered macro-segmental architecture. Across five representative traditions spanning the Semitic, Hellenic, Germanic, and Slavic branches, the linear sequence is anchored by four positional nodes. These nodes correspond historically to the Northwest Semitic guttural and glide series (ʾ–h–y–ʿ), which were systematically reanalyzed as the primary vocalic trajectory (A–E–I–O) in recipient Indo-European scripts. Furthermore, the dental plosive grapheme T functions as an invariant systemic boundary closing the foundational core of the script. All historical graphemic additions—supplementary consonants, long vowels, and extended allographic or numerical terminals (such as the Hebrew sofit series in extended gematria)—are appended strictly downstream of T. A comparative corpus analysis across four major sacred texts (the Greek New Testament, the Hebrew Masoretic Torah, the Arabic Quran, and the Church Slavonic Ostrog Bible) indicates that rank-frequency distributions diverge substantially while nodal sequence remains invariant. These results indicate that alphabetic transmission is preserved as a structured semiotic code rather than a statistical byproduct of phonemic frequency.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23944485
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225228663
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