Ef is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

. It commonly represents the voiceless labiodental fricative

Voiceless labiodental fricative

The voiceless labiodental fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is .-Features:Features of the voiceless labiodental fricative:...

 /f/, like the pronunciation of ⟨f⟩ in "fill". The Cyrillic letter Ef is romanized as ⟨f⟩.

History

The Cyrillic letter Ef was derived from the Greek letter Phi

Phi (letter)

Phi , pronounced or sometimes in English, and in modern Greek, is the 21st letter of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greek, it represents , a voiceless labiodental fricative. In Ancient Greek it represented , an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive...

 (Φ φ). It replaced Fita

Fita

Fita is a letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet. The shape and the name of the letter are derived from the Greek letter Theta .In the Cyrillic numeral system, Fita has a value of 9.- Shape :...

  in the Russian alphabet

Russian alphabet

The Russian alphabet is a form of the Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

 in 1918.

The name of Ef in the Early Cyrillic alphabet

Early Cyrillic alphabet

The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th or 10th century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language...

 was (frtŭ).

In the Cyrillic numeral system

Cyrillic numerals

The Cyrillic numerals are a numbering system derived from the Cyrillic script, used by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in Russia as late as the early 18th century when Peter the Great replaced it with Arabic numerals....

, Ef had a value of 500.

Usage

The Slavic languages practically do not have native words containing /f/; this sound, which did not exist in Proto-Indo-European

Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

, arose in Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 and Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 from PIE (which yielded Slavic /b/) and in the Germanic languages

Germanic languages

The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

 from PIE (which remained unchanged in Slavic). The letter ф is, therefore, almost exclusively found in words of foreign origin, especially Greek (from both th and ph), Latin, French, German, English, and Turkic. 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, for example пв /pv/ in Serbian уфати (from Church Slavonic уповати), and хв /xv/, or х /x/ in the Russian toponym Фили (from хилый). There are some examples of native Slavic words (and variations) which include and use the Ф letter natively, like фати or сфати in Macedonian (which represent the Macedonian sound change from the Old Slavic "hv" to "f").

Russian

Ef is the twenty-first letter of the Russian alphabet

Russian alphabet

The Russian alphabet is a form of the Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

. It represents the consonant /f/ unless it is before a palatalizing

Palatalization

In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....

 vowel when it represents /fʲ/.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Φ φ/ϕ : Greek letter Phi : Cyrillic letter Fita
• F f : Latin letter F
  F
  F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The origin of ⟨f⟩ is the Semitic letter vâv that represented a sound like or . Graphically, it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club...
  
  

Computing codes

character	Ф		ф
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EF		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER EF
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...	1060	0424	1092	0444
UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...	208 164	D0 A4	209 132	D1 84
Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...	Ф	Ф	ф	ф
KOI8-R KOI8-R KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters...  and KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,...	230	E6	198	C6
Code page 855 Code page 855 Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:...	171	AB	170	AA
Code page 866 Code page 866 Code page 866 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. It is based on the "alternative character set" of GOST 19768-87...	148	94	228	E4
Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages...	212	D4	244	F4
ISO-8859-5	196	C4	228	E4
Macintosh Cyrillic	148	94	244	F4