Editing F (section)

== History ==
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|- 
! Proto-Sinaitic
! Phoenician<br />[[Waw (letter)|waw]]
! Western Greek<br />[[Digamma]]
! Etruscan<br />V or W
! Latin<br />F
|-
| [[File:Proto-semiticW-01.svg|class=skin-invert-image|40px]]
| [[File:PhoenicianW-01.svg|class=skin-invert-image|frameless|40x40px]]
| [[File:Greek_Digamma_02.svg|class=skin-invert-image|40px]]
| [[File:EtruscanF-01.svg|class=skin-invert-image|30px]]
| [[File:Capitalis monumentalis F.svg|class=skin-invert-image|x30px|Latin F]]
|}

The origin of ⟨F⟩ is the [[History of the alphabet#Semitic alphabet|Semitic]] letter ''[[Waw (letter)|waw]]'', which represented a sound like {{IPA|/v/}} or {{IPA|/w/}}. It probably originally depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable [[Egyptian hieroglyph]] such as [[List of Egyptian hieroglyphs by common name: M-Z#M|that which represented the word ''mace'']] (transliterated as ḥ(dj)): <hiero>T3</hiero>

The [[Phoenician alphabet|Phoenician]] form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, ''[[upsilon]]'' (which resembled its descendant ⟨[[Y]]⟩ but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters ⟨[[U]]⟩, ⟨[[V]]⟩, and ⟨[[W]]⟩); and, with another form, as a consonant, ''[[digamma]]'', which indicated the pronunciation {{IPA|/w/}}, as in Phoenician. Latin ⟨F⟩, despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from [[digamma]] and closely resembles it in form.

After sound changes eliminated {{IPA|/w/}} from most dialects of Greek (Doric Greek retained it), ''[[digamma]]'' was used only as a numeral. However, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters descended from digamma. In the [[Etruscan alphabet]], ⟨F⟩ probably represented {{IPA|/w/}}, as in Greek, and the [[Etruscan civilization|Etruscans]] formed the [[Digraph (orthography)|digraph]] ⟨FH⟩ to represent {{IPA|/f/}}. (At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter [[phi]] ⟨Φ⟩ then represented an aspirated [[voiceless bilabial plosive]] {{IPA|/p<sup>h</sup>/}}, although in [[Modern Greek]] it has come to represent {{IPA|/f/}}.) The Etruscan digraph may have been inspired by the rare use of ⟨ϜΗ⟩ in archaic Greek inscriptions for a dialectal sound like {{IPAblink|ʍ}}, e.g. in the reflexive pronoun ϜΗΕ, which corresponds to Classical ἕ ''hé''.<ref>Compare: {{cite book |last1=Bartoněk |first1=Antonín |title=Development of the consonantal system in ancient Greek dialects |date=1961 |page=142 |url=https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/node/54382}}</ref> When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used ⟨V⟩ (from Greek ''[[upsilon]]'') not only for the vowel {{IPA|/u/}}, but also for the corresponding semivowel {{IPA|/w/}}, leaving ⟨F⟩ available for {{IPA|/f/}}. Initially, ⟨FH⟩ was also used for this sound in Latin, but the ⟨H⟩ was soon dropped. And so out of the various ''vav'' variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which the Greeks did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.

The [[lowercase]] ⟨f⟩ is not related to the visually similar [[long s]], ⟨ſ⟩ (or [[medial s]]). The use of the ''long s'' largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ⟨f⟩ when using a short mid-bar.