Toward Ecosophy

In the course of some recent reflections on numerology, I've come up with an interesting (at least to me) theory about why it works so well. Plenty of people have objected to the notion that the name your parents happened to give you, spelled in the English alphabet -- that clumsy confection of historical accidents -- should have anything to do with your personality and destiny. They've also pointed out that there's no consistency between sound values and numerology in different languages:  in English, for example, G is 7, while the same sound in Hebrew is assigned to the letter Gimel, which has the numerical value of 3.

Eppur si muove, as Galileo said: and yet it does move. In the same way, absurd as it is, numerology does seem to work.

My speculation is based on how children in the US -- me, for example -- learn the English alphabet. As far as I know, it's always taught by way of a little song, with a tune closely related to those other childhood favorites, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep." I'm pretty sure that if I started singing "A, B, C, D, E, F, G..." to the familiar tune, every one of my readers who grew up speaking English in the United States could match me note for note. (If you need a reminder, you can listen to the song here.)

So every person who learned the English alphabet that way has, hardwired into his or her brain, a sense of the alphabet as a sequence, in which each letter has a fixed place. If numbers have archetypal meanings at an even deeper level of the mind, as Carl Jung argued, then learning the letters in a fixed sequence like that would be more than enough to link the letters to the numbers and their meanings. What's more, that would explain why different alphabetical systems of numerology work equally well despite differences in sound values; if you grew up in Israel and absorbed Gimel as the third letter, that'll be the correlate of the number 3 for you, all through your life.

Now here's where I need some help. I have no idea how children learn alphabets outside the United States. What jingle, if any, children sing along with the alphabet in Britain and Australia is a mystery to me, to say nothing about places, alphabets, and non-alphabetic writing systems further afield. So what I'd like to ask is this:

1) If you grew up speaking and reading English outside the United States, was there a rhyme or a jingle your parents or teachers used to get you to learn the alphabet in sequence?

2) If you grew up speaking and reading a language other than English, how did you learn that language's writing system? Was there a song, a poem, or some other sequential method, or was it a completely different approach?

3) If you grew up speaking and reading a language other than English, is numerology practiced in that language, and if so, how does it work? (I'm especially interested here in non-alphabetic writing systems -- syllabaries like Korean hanggul, for example, or ideographs like Chinese.)

What say you, readers?  Inquiring Druids want to know!