Ask a Question
or
Create a Poll
  1. Home /
  2. Questions /
  3. Education And Learning
  4. / Education Subjects
  5. / English Grammar
  6. / Grammar Usage And Syntax

by Drublic on February 13th, 2007

Drublic

Question

Help answer this question below.

What is the origin of upper and lower case F (Ff) in the English language?

  • Like
  • Report
Share:
Other

Answers. Showing one answer.

  • by canadianhelper on February 13th, 2007

    canadianhelper

    The origin of F is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the sound /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 "mace":
    T3

    The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, Y, but was also ancestor to our letters U, V, and W); and with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which resembled our letter F, but was pronounced /w/, as in Phoenician. (Later on, this /w/ phoneme disappeared from Greek, resulting in digamma being used as a numeral only.).

    In Etruscan, F also stood for /w/; however, they came up with the innovation of using the digraph FH to represent the sound /f/, and the letter acquired this sound on its own when the Romans picked it up (since they had already borrowed U independently from Greek upsilon to stand for /w/). The letter phi (Φ φ) came to approximate the sound of /f/ in Greek.

    The minuscule f is not to be confused with ?, the archaic long s (or medial s). For example, "sinfulness" is rendered as "?infulne?s" using the long s. The use of the long s died out by the end of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion with f.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F

    Comments

    • I was hoping you would answer one of these. I'm going through the alphabet, slowly, and the answers have been less than stellar for the most part. Some have been good, but others...so so.

      Drublic

      by Drublic on February 13th, 2007

    • These are so easy to give proper answers too...I was leaving the G for someone else...ready for a new logo today?

      canadianhelper

      by canadianhelper on February 13th, 2007

    • Yeah, I figured wiki had good info on these. Was hoping for a fairly detailed answer like this. New logo? Who's getting a new logo? And I accidentally posted this as an answer the first time. Can you mark that as nonsense for me?

      Drublic

      by Drublic on February 13th, 2007

    • Flagged. I mean I'm putting up a new 'famous logo' question.

      canadianhelper

      by canadianhelper on February 13th, 2007

    • Ah, gotchya. See if I'm a bit quicker on this one :)

      Drublic

      by Drublic on February 13th, 2007

    5 comments | Post one | Permalink

Want to attach an image to your answer? Click here.

Did this answer your question? If not, then ask a new question or create a poll.

More Questions. Additional questions in this category.

You're reading What is the origin of upper and lower case F (Ff) in the English language?

Follow us on Facebook!

Related Ads

Related Questions

Professionally Researched

Answerbag

a Demand Media company