*~F to the F~*

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• published: 30 Apr 2010
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F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. English (Loudspeaker.svg /ˈɛf/) is spelled ‹ef› or ‹f›.[1][2] Contents [hide] * 1 History * 2 Usage * 3 Codes for computing * 4 See also * 5 References [edit] History Proto-Semitic W Phoenician waw Etruscan W Greek Digamma Roman F Proto-semiticW-01.png PhoenicianW-01.png EtruscanF-01.svg Digamma uc lc.svg Roman F The origin of ‹f› is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the /v/, and originally probably represented either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph, such as that for the word mace: T3 F the Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, ‹Y›, but was also ancestor to Roman letters ‹U›, ‹V›, and ‹W›); and with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which resembled ‹F›, but indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (Later on, /w/ disappeared from Greek, resulting in digamma being used as a numeral only.) In Etruscan, ‹F› also represented /w/; however, they formed the digraph ‹FH› to represent /f/; when the Romans picked up, the letter, they had already borrowed ‹U› from Greek upsilon to stand for /w/. At the this time, the Greek letter phi ‹Φ› represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive, /pʰ/ though it has now come to approximate the sound of /f/ in Modern Greek. The lower case ‹f› is not related to the visually similar long s, ‹ſ›. The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ‹f›. [edit] Usage In English, ‹f› represents the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. ‹F› represents the same sound in most other languages written in the Latin alphabet, provided they use the letter at all; some exceptions include Turkmen, where it represents the voiceless bilabial fricative /ɸ/, and Welsh, where it represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/. In formal typography, particularly for serifed fonts, minuscule ‹f› is one of the most commonly ligated letters. Unicode encodes several ligatures beginning with lowercase ‹f› (U+FB00 through U+FB04) for compatibility with old character code sets, but recommends that those should not be used.[3]