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ISO basic
Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd
Ee Ff Gg Hh
Ii Jj Kk Ll
Mm Nn Oo Pp
Qq Rr Ss Tt
Writing cursive forms of F Uu Vv Ww Xx
Yy Zz
F (named ef[1] /ɛf/)[2] is the sixth letter in the modern English
alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
v
Contents t
[hide]
e
1History
2Use in writing systems
o 2.1English
o 2.2Other languages
o 2.3Other systems
3Related characters
o 3.1Ancestors, descendants and siblings
o 3.2Ligatures and abbreviations
4Computing codes
5Other representations
6Footnotes
o 6.1Notes
o 6.2References
7External links
History[edit]
Proto-Semitic Phoenician Greek Etruscan Roman F
W waw Digamma V or W
The origin of 'F' is the Semitic letter vâv (or waw) that represented a sound like /v/ or /w/. Graphically
it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a
comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as that which represented the word mace(transliterated as
ḥ(dj)):
The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its
descendant 'Y' but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters 'U', 'V', and 'W'); and, with another
form, as a consonant, digamma, which indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. Latin 'F,'
despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from digamma and closely resembles
it in form.
After sound changes eliminated /w/ from spoken Greek, digamma was used only as a numeral.
However, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters
descended from digamma. In the Etruscan alphabet, 'F' probably represented /w/, as in Greek, and
the Etruscans formed the digraph 'FH' to represent /f/. (At the time these letters were borrowed,
there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi 'Φ' then represented an
aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /pʰ/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.)
When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' (from Greek upsilon) not only for the
vowel /u/, but also for the corresponding semivowel /w/, leaving 'F' available for /f/. And so out of the
various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to
a sound which its antecedents in Greek and Etruscan did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the
basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.
The lowercase ' f ' is not related to the visually similar long s, ' ſ ' (or medial s). The use of the long
s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ' f ' when
using a short mid-bar (see more at: S).
Related characters[edit]
Ancestors, descendants and siblings[edit]
Computing codes[edit]
Character F f
UTF-8 70 46 102 66
ASCII 1 70 46 102 66
1
Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows,
ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations[edit]
NATO phonetic Morse code
Foxtrot ··–·
Footnotes[edit]
Notes[edit]
References[edit]
External links[edit]
Media related to F at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of F at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of f at Wiktionary
[hide]
Latin script
History
Spread
Romanization
Roman numerals
phonetic alphabets
X-SAMPA
Spelling alphabet
ch
cz
dž
dz
gh
ij
Digraphs ll
ly
nh
ny
sh
sz
th
dzs
Trigraphs
eau
Tetragraphs ough
Pentagraphs tzsch
QWERTY
QWERTZ
AZERTY
SO/IEC 646
Unicode
Diacritics
Palaeography
Categories:
ISO basic Latin letters
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This page was last edited on 15 January 2018, at 10:12.
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