F

Proto-Semitic W	Phoenician  waw	Etruscan V or W	Greek Digamma	Roman F

The origin o 'F' is the Semitic letter vâv (or waw) that representit a soond lik /v/ or /w/. Graphically it oreeginally probably depictit aither a huik or a club. It mey hae been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph sic as that which represented the wird mace (transliteratit as ḥ(dj)):-

The Phoenician fairm o the letter wis adoptit intae Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, 'Y' but wis an aa ancestor tae Roman letters 'U', 'V', an 'W'); an wi anither fairm, as a consonant, digamma, which resembled 'F', but indicatit the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (Efter /w/ disappeared frae Greek, digamma wis uised as a numeral anly.)

In Etruscan, 'F' probably representit /w/, as in Greek; an the Etruscans fairmed the digraph 'FH' tae represent /f/. When the Romans adoptit the alphabet, thay uised 'V' (frae Greek upsilon) tae staund for /w/ as well as /u/, leavin 'F' available for /f/. (At that time, the Greek letter phi 'Φ' representit an aspiratit voiceless bilabial plosive /pʰ/, tho in Modren Greek it approximates the soond o /f/.) An sae oot o the various vav variants in the Mediterranean warld, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached tae a soond which its antecedents in Greek an Etruscan did nae hae. The Roman alphabet fairms the basis o the alphabet uised the day for Inglis an mony ither leids.

The lawercase ' f ' is nae relatit tae the visually seemilar lang s, ' ſ ' (or medial s). The uise o the lang s lairgely died oot bi the beginnin o the 19t century, maistly tae prevent confusion wi ' f ' when uisin a short mid-bar (see mair at: S).

• Ƒ ƒ : Latin letter F wi huik
• Ф ф : Cyrillic letter Ef
• Φ φ/ϕ : Greek letter Phi

¹ An aa for encodings based on ASCII, includin the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 an Macintosh faimilies o encodings.