Pe (letter)

Pe is the seventeenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Pei Ivrit|פ, Persian alphabet Pe _pr. پ and Arabic alphabet ArabDIN|fāʼ _ar. ف (in abjadi order).

The original sound value is a voiceless bilabial plosive: IPA|/p/; it retains this value in most Semitic languages except for Arabic, which having lost IPA|/p/ now uses it to render a voiceless labiodental fricative IPA|/f/.

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Pi (Π), Latin P, and Cyrillic Pe.

Origins of Pe

Pe is usually assumed to come from a pictogram of a mouth (in Hebrew "pe"; in Arabic, "fam").

Hebrew Pei

Variations on written form/pronunciation:

The letter Pei is one of the six letters which can receive a Dagesh Kal. The six are Bet, Gimel, Daleth, Kaph, Pei, and Tav (see Hebrew Alphabet for more about these letters).

There are two orthographic variants of this letter which indicate a different pronunciation:

Pei with the dagesh

When the Pei has a "dot" in its center, known as a dagesh, it represents a voiceless bilabial plosive, IPA|/p/}. There are various rules in Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used.

Pei without the dagesh (Fei)

When this letter appears as פ "without" the dagesh ("dot") in its center then it usually represents a voiceless labiodental fricative IPA|/f/.

Final form of Pei/Fei

At the end of words the letter's written form changes to a "Pei/Fei Sophit" (Final Pei/Fei):
*ף This does not alter the pronunciation (see above).

However, when a word in modern Hebrew borrowed from another language ends in /p/, normally a pe with a dagesh at the end of the word is used instead of the final form.

ignificance of Pei:

In gematria, Pei represents the number 80. Its final form represents 800 but this is rarely used, Tav written twice (400+400) being used instead.

Arabic fāʼ

The letter is named "fāʼ", and is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

In the process of developing from Proto-Semitic, Proto-Semitic IPA|/p/ became Arabic IPA|/f/, and this is reflected in the use of the letter representing IPA|/p/ in other Semitic languages for IPA|/f/ in Arabic.

Fayʼ-fatḥa (فَـ IPA|/fa/) is a multi-function prefix most commonly equivalent to "so" or "so that." For example: نكتب "naktub" ("we write") → فنكتب "fanaktub" ("so we write").

The Maghribi style of writing fa' is different. It is written with a dot underneath like this ڢ . Once the pervailant style, it is now only used in Maghribi countries for writing Qur'an with the exception of Libya which adopted the Mashriqi form. [Muhammad Ghoniem, M S M Saifullah, cAbd ar-Rahmân Robert Squires & cAbdus Samad, [http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Text/Scribal/scribal.html Are There Scribal Errors In The Qur'ân?] , Retrieved 2008-March-20] . See also qaf for the Maghribi style of writing that letter.

References