Ef (Cyrillic)

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Heading=Cyrillic letter Ef


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Ef (Ф, ф) is the twenty-second letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. It represents the consonant IPA|/f/ unless it is before a palatalizing vowel when it represents IPA|/fʲ/.

It was directly derived from the Greek letter phi (Φ). Additionally, it has replaced Fita (Unicode|Ѳ) in the Russian version of the alphabet since 1918. Unlike phi, however, it is transliterated as "f", not "ph".

The Slavic languages practically do not have native words containing IPA|/f/; this sound, which did not exist in Proto-Indo-European, arose in Greek and Latin from PIE *IPA|bʰ (which yielded Slavic IPA|/b/) and in the Germanic languages from PIE *IPA|p (which remained unchanged in Slavic). The letter ф is, therefore, almost exclusively found in words of foreign (both Western, especially Greek, Latin, French, German, English, and Eastern, mostly Turkic) origin. 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" IPA|/pv/ in Serbian у"ф"ати (from Church Slavonic у"пов"ати), and "хв" IPA|/xv/, in Bulgarian "ф"аля (from Church Slavonic "хв"алю), or "х" IPA|/x/ in the Russian toponym "Ф"или (from "х"илый).

See also

*F, f - Ef (Latin)
*Φ, φ or ϕ - Phi (Greek)