Pe (letter)

Pe is the seventeenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Pei פ and Persian, Arabic fāʼ ف (in abjadi order). (look below)

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

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

Origins

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

Hebrew Pe

The Hebrew spelling is "פֵּא".

Variations on written form/pronunciation

The letter Pe is one of the six letters which can receive a Dagesh Kal. The six are Bet, Gimel, Daleth, Kaph, Pe, and Tav.

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

Pe with the dagesh

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

Fe

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

Final form of Pe/Fe

At the end of words, the letter's written form changes to a Pe/Fe Sophit (Final Pe/Fe):

• ף This does not alter the pronunciation (see above).

When a word in modern Hebrew borrowed from another language ends in /p/, a pe with a dagesh at the end of the word is used instead of the final form, as a word almost never ends with a letter containing a Dagesh, except for very few biblical exceptions. A Pe sofit is virtually non-existent in Hebrew, .

Significance

In gematria, Pe 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 ﻑ is named ﻓﺎء fāʾ. It is commonly known in Egypt as [fe]. It is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

Normally, the letter ﻑ fāʼ renders /f/ sound, but may also be used some names and loanwords where it can render /v/, might be arabized as /f/ in accordance to its spelling.[as in يونيلفر (Unilever)]. It may be used interchangeably with the modified letter ﭪ - ve (with 3 dots) in this case.

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

Examples on usage in Modern Standard Arabic:

Fāʾ-fatḥah (فَـ /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 prevalent style, it is now only used in Maghribi countries for writing Qur'an with the exception of Libya which adopted the Mashriqi form. See also qaf for the Maghribi style of writing that letter.

References