F is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ef or eff[1] (pronounced /ɛf/).
[edit] History
| Proto-Semitic W |
Phoenician W |
Etruscan W |
Greek Digamma (W) |
Roman F |
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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":
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 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 lower case f is not to be confused with ſ, the archaic long s (or medial s). For example, "sinfulness" is rendered as "ſinfulneſs" 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.
[edit] Codes for computing
Alternative representations of F
In Unicode the capital F codepoint is U+0046, the lowercase f codepoint U+0066.
The ASCII code for capital F is 70 and for lowercase f is 102; or in binary 01000110 and 01100110, correspondingly.
The EBCDIC code for capital F is 198 and for lowercase f is 134.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "F" and "f" for upper and lower case respectively.
[edit] Ligatures
In formal typography, particularly for serifed fonts, minuscule f is one of the most commonly ligated letters. Unicode provides the following ligatures of f, l and i: ff, fi, fl, ffi and ffl (U+fb00 through U+fb04).
[edit] Variants of F
- The F with hook or script F (Unicode U+0191 and U+0192, Ƒ and ƒ) is used in the transcription of Kabye and other West African languages for the voiceless bilabial fricative. Lowercase ƒ is the currency sign for the Dutch gulden (which no longer exists as of the introduction of the euro)
- F with dot above (Unicode U+1e1e and U+1e1f, Ḟ and ḟ) is used in the old orthography of Irish
- The French Franc can be indicated by FF or ₣ (Unicode U+20a3)
- In mathematics, the script capital F (Unicode U+2131, ℱ) often represents the Fourier transform
- There also exist:
- The turned F (Unicode U+2132 and U+214E, Ⅎ and ⅎ), a letter that the Roman Emperor Claudius attempted to add to the Latin alphabet
- The parenthesized small F (Unicode U+24a1, ⒡)
- The circled F (Unicode U+24bb and U+24d5, Ⓕ and ⓕ)
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 1976.
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