I’ve been reciting the alphabet since I was 3, but never looked at the pattern of the official syllables.
There’s a fairly consistent logic. All stops come before a vowel, most liquids and some fricatives come after a vowel.
H is an odd exception. If it’s considered a fricative, it should be He. If a liquid, it should be Ayh, but that wouldn’t work. Instead it’s replaced by ch to make Aych, which doesn’t make sense.
X, a cluster of stop and fricative, is more logical. We treat it like S and F, so it’s Ex. If we had treated it as a stop it would be Xe, but English doesn’t want to pronounce that combination.
W is the strangest exception. If it had followed the rest of the logic, it would have been We. (Liquids come after a vowel unless unpronounceable that way.) W was treated as an unwanted intruder because literary types, even in the 1800s, refused to accept any additions to the classical Latin alphabet. J, V and W were necessary parts of English but they were illegitimate, thus not recognized in alphabetizing indexes or forming ciphers.
If the syllables had been designed better, we wouldn’t really need phonetic tricks like Alpha Bravo Charlie. For instance we could say Pa To Ku, Ba Do Gu, Am En, Af Es. We did follow this rule with Ar El, possibly from a British tendency in words like derby and clerk.
C, Q, K also have a useful vowel distinction, probably by accident. All three letters are pronounced K by default, but they received different vowels to avoid redundancy. (In AngloSaxon C was K by default, CH before a front vowel as in Italian. It turned into S before a front vowel under French influence. The syllable has a front vowel, so we pronounce it S in that context.)
Polistra's Mill 