Is there a defined way to order phonemes, phones, or other qualities of speech, such as those represented in the IPA?
Suppose I'm listing the following sounds (and their descriptions, say, or links to wikipedia articles about them):
- œ
- i
- y
- d͡ʒ
How should they be ordered? One might try to order "alphabetically", but that seems completely arbitrary. Ordering by mouth position probably makes a lot more sense (i, y, ɨ, ʉ, ɯ, u, ɪ, ʏ, ...). But still there's a lot of room for interpretation here.
Before I spend much time thinking about this, though, I thought I'd see if there's already a pre-defined sorting order for these concepts.