F, or f, is the sixth letter of the Latin alphabet and many modern alphabets influenced by it, including the modern English alphabet and the alphabets of all other modern western European languages. Its name in English is ef[a] (pronounced /ˈɛf/ⓘ), and the plural is efs.[1]
The origin of ⟨F⟩ is the Semitic letter waw, which represented a sound like /v/ or /w/. It probably originally depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as that which represented the word mace (transliterated as ḥ(dj)):
The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant ⟨Y⟩ but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters ⟨U⟩, ⟨V⟩, and ⟨W⟩); and, with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. Latin ⟨F⟩, despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from digamma and closely resembles it in form.
After sound changes eliminated /w/ from most dialects of Greek (Doric Greek retained it), digamma was used only as a numeral. However, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters descended from digamma. In the Etruscan alphabet, ⟨F⟩ probably represented /w/, as in Greek, and the Etruscans formed the digraph ⟨FH⟩ to represent /f/. (At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi ⟨Φ⟩ then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive/ph/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.) The Etruscan digraph may have been inspired by the rare use of ⟨ϜΗ⟩ in archaic Greek inscriptions for a dialectal sound like [ʍ], e.g. in the reflexive pronoun ϜΗΕ, which corresponds to Classical ἕ hé (see Ancient Greek phonology §Semivowels).[2]
When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used ⟨V⟩ (from Greek upsilon) not only for the vowel /u/, but also for the corresponding semivowel /w/, leaving ⟨F⟩ available for /f/. Initially, ⟨FH⟩ was also used for this sound in Latin, but the ⟨H⟩ was soon dropped. And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which the Greeks did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.
The lowercase ⟨f⟩ is not related to the visually similar long s, ⟨ſ⟩ (or medial s). The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ⟨f⟩ when using a short mid-bar.
In the Hepburn romanization of Japanese, ⟨f⟩ is used to represent [ɸ]. This sound is usually considered to be an allophone of /h/, which is pronounced in different ways depending upon its context; Japanese /h/ is pronounced as [ɸ] before /u/.
In countries such as the United States, the letter "F" is defined as a failure in terms of academic evaluation. Other countries that use this system include Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and the Netherlands.
The letter F has become an Internet meme, where it is used to pay respects. This use is derived from the 2014 video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, where in a quick-time event, protagonist Jack Mitchell must pay his respects to his friend Will Irons who fell in combat in a previous mission, represented by the player pressing F when playing the PC version. People on the Internet use the letter F sometimes in a genuine way to express respect, sadness, or condolences towards other Internet personalities, Internet memes, or other players on certain events.[5]
ꟳ: Modifier letter capital F[12] – Used to mark tone for the Chatino orthography in Oaxaca, Mexico; Used as a generic transcription for a falling tone; used in para-IPA notation.
Ꝼ ꝼ: Insular F is used in Norse and Old English contexts[13]
ꟻ: Reversed F was used in ancient Roman texts to stand for filia (daughter) or femina (woman)[14]
𐌅: Old Italic V/F (originally used for V, in languages such as Etruscan and Oscan), which derives from Greek Digamma, and is the ancestor of modern Latin F
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