Ф, the letter ef

History

Ф ф, known as ef or fe, is a Cyrillic letter that commonly represents the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/, the sound of f in fill, flee or fall. It is romanized as f and stands twenty-second in the modern Russian alphabet of thirty-three.

In handwriting the letter belongs to a script of known age. Russian cursive was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, the rapid or running script that had served as the 14th to 17th century chancery hand of the earlier Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav, and it became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script of books.

Anyone reading Russian written before 1918 needs to know that this sound was once shared with a second letter. Ѳ, called fita, corresponded to the Greek theta θ. Russian never had the voiceless dental fricative that theta represents in Greek, so ѳ was pronounced as f and was used only in foreign words, particularly Greek ones. Through the 19th century it was gradually lost in favour of ф or т, and a Western, French-like pronunciation carried some words over by itself, so that ѳеатръ became театръ. The reform prepared by Aleksey Shakhmatov and implemented shortly after the revolution of November 1917 conflated ѳ with ф outright, turning мараѳонъ into марафон.

The practical effect on a page is simple to state and slow to appear. The reform removed pairs of completely homophonous graphemes from the alphabet, Ѳ and Ф among them, bringing the alphabet closer to the actual phonological system of the language. The decree itself forbade the retraining of people trained under the old norm, and a spelling counted as incorrect only if it violated both the old and the new rules, so older forms lingered; some émigré publications continued to appear in the former orthography until the 1970s.