When it’s time to teach children the alphabet, in English it goes like this: you learn the names of the letters, then some words that start with those letters. “Ae,” “bee,” cee,” and so on are what English letters are called, of course. Made-up words that generally don’t mean anything else. Learning the alphabet in English involves a second step where you explain that “a is for apple, b is for ball, c is for cookie.”
This is not the way it works in some languages. The ancient Egyptians came up with a slightly different scheme. They skipped the step where they made up names for the symbols and went straight to the “a is for apple” part. They just called the symbol “apple.” Not literally, of course; I’m not sure apples were even available to the pyramid builders. But the Egyptians only applied this spottily, because for one thing they used hieroglyphics, which included pictograms as well as symbols representing sounds. Real alphabets only represent sounds symbolically.
The Phoenicians, who are generally credited with the first real alphabet, picked up on the idea and applied it to their symbol system. The modern Hebrew alphabet is based on the Phoenician one (so is ours), and their first four letters are called “ox, house, camel, door.” Actually aleph, beth, gimel, and daleth.
Languages that name their letters that way are “acrophonic.” That’s a word minted in the 1800s when there was a huge groundswell of interest in everything related to ancient Egypt, including hieroglyphics. “Acrophonic” is based on two Greek words: “acro” (the first or highest part of something) and “phony” (sound). This is too bad; I think it would have been much more interesting if they’d coined a word based on Egyptian. But anyway, that’s why English has a special word for as small a detail as “the letters of the alphabet are named after words that begin with that letter.”
And by the way, if you’re interested in a graphic depiction of where our alphabet came from, have a look at https://usefulcharts.com/products/evolution-of-the-alphabet (note: they’re actually selling these charts, but this isn’t meant as an ad. Well it would be, but they’re not paying me anything, so never mind.)
