Ef (Cyrillic)


Ef or Fe is a Cyrillic letter, commonly representing the voiceless labiodental fricative, like the pronunciation of in "fill". The Cyrillic letter Ef is romanized as. In some languages including Russian, it is known as Fe.

History

The Cyrillic letter Ef was derived from the Greek letter Phi. It merged with an eliminated letter Fita in the Russian alphabet in 1918.
The name of Ef in the Early Cyrillic alphabet is , in later Church Slavonic and Russian form it became фертъ.
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Ef has a value of 500.

Appearance

The Slavic languages have almost no native words containing. This sound did not exist in Proto-Indo-European. It arose in Greek and Latin from PIE . In some instances in Latin, it represented historical th-fronting and derived from Proto-Indo-European. In the Germanic languages, the f sound arose from PIE, which remained unchanged in Slavic. The letter ф is thus almost exclusively found in words of foreign origin, especially Greek, Latin, French, German, Dutch, English, and Turkic.
Example borrowings in Russian:
The few native Slavic words with this letter are examples of onomatopoeia or reflect sporadic pronunciation shifts:
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 unless it is before a palatalizing vowel, when it represents.

Related letters and other similar characters