P

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see P (disambiguation).
For technical reasons, "P#" redirects here. For the programming language, see P Sharp.
For technical reasons, ":P" redirects here. For the keyboard symbol, see Emoticon.

P (named pee /ˈpiː/[1] ) is the 16th letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Usage

In English orthography and most other European languages, p represents the sound /p/.

A common digraph in English is ⟨ph⟩, which represents the sound /f/, and can be used to transliterate ⟨φ⟩ phi in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph ⟨pf⟩ is common, representing a labial affricate /pf/.

Arabic does not have a native phoneme /p/; the Proto-Semitic language phoneme /p/ developed into the Arabic phoneme /f/. P in modern loanwords is pronounced as /b/.

Most English words beginning with P are of foreign origin, primarily French, Latin, Greek, and Slavic; these languages preserve Proto-Indo-European initial /*p/. Native English cognates of such words often start with F, since English is a Germanic language and thus has undergone Grimm's law; a native English word with initial /p/ would reflect Proto-Indo-European initial /*b/, which is so rare that its existence as a phoneme is disputed.

However, native English words with non-initial P are quite common; such words can come from either Kluge's law or the sp combination; PIE /*p/ is preserved after hbs.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [p] is used to represent the voiceless bilabial plosive.

History

Phoenician
P		 Archaic Greek
Pi		 Greek
Pi		 Etruscan
P		 Latin
P

Related letters and other similar characters

The Latin letter P represents the same sound as the Greek letter pi, but it looks like the Greek letter rho.

Computing codes

Character P p
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P     LATIN SMALL LETTER P
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 80 U+0050 112 U+0070
UTF-8 80 50 112 70
Numeric character reference P P p p
EBCDIC family 215 D7 151 97
ASCII 1 80 50 112 70
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

NATO phonetic Morse code
Papa ·––·
Signal flag Flag semaphore Braille

See also

References

  1. ↑ "P", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "pee," op. cit.

External links