Numeric value: 500 | ||
Ef (Ф ф; italics: Ф ф) is a Cyrillic letter, commonly representing the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/, like the pronunciation of ⟨f⟩ in "fill". The Cyrillic letter Ef is romanized as ⟨f⟩.
Contents
History
The Cyrillic letter Ef was derived from the Greek letter Phi (Φ φ). It merged with an eliminated letter Fita (Ѳ) in the Russian alphabet in 1918.
The name of Ef in the Early Cyrillic alphabet is фрьтъ (fr̥tŭ or frĭtŭ), in later Church Slavonic and Russian form it became фертъ (fert).
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Ef has a value of 500.
Usage
The Slavic languages have almost no native words containing /f/, which did not exist in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It arose in Greek and Latin from PIE *bʰ (which yielded Slavic /b/). In some instances in Latin, it represented historical th-fronting and derived from Proto-Indo-European *dʰ, and in the Germanic languages from PIE *p, which remained unchanged in Slavic. The letter ф is thus almost exclusively found in words of foreign origin, especially Greek (from ph and sometimes from th), Latin, French, German, English, and Turkic.
The few native Slavic words with this letter (in different languages) are examples of onomatopoeia (like Russian verbs фукать, фыркать etc.) or reflect sporadic pronunciation shifts:
Slavic languages
Ef is the 21st letter of the Bulgarian alphabet; the 22nd letter of the Russian alphabet; 23rd letter of the Belarusian alphabet; the 25th letter of the Serbian and Ukrainian alphabet; and the 26th letter of the Macedonian alphabet. It represents the consonant /f/ unless it is before a palatalizing vowel, when it represents /fʲ/.