F The 6th letter of the English and Latin, the 20th of the Arabic, and the 23d of the Persian alphabet, indicates a labio-dental sound, produced by the passage of the expired air between the lower lip and the upper incisive teeth, while the glottis and larynx are almost at rest. Quintilian calls this sound "scarcely human," since it is a mere afflatus, and is wrongly placed among the semi-vocals. Its sonorous parallel is the softer sound of V (as in English), in producing which the glottis and larynx are engaged. F is represented in ancient Greek both by the (ph) and the di-gamma, in corresponding words; but the sound of the former was less harsh and rather aspirated than blowing {efflatus), and the latter sounded almost like our V. The figure of the Latin F arose from the doubling of the Greek T. The emperor Claudius is reported to have used it invertedto represent V. As a numeral sign for 6, the stigma was employed by the Alexandrines, as one of the three instead of this digamma, which is named or van. The shape of the stigmais an inverted Oscic and Umbric F We find the prototype of our cursive f on ancient Hebrew coins; but in the present so-called Hebrew, as in the Syriac, Sabaeic, Palmyrenic, and some other kindred writings, the van takes the place of F, and indicates the sounds of v and u. F occurs in the same place also on the Idalian tablet of Cyprus, in Lycian, also in Tuarik (Berber), and in some other writings. In the Cyrillic alphabet the phert and phiecorrespond to it as the 27th letter, in Glagolitic as the 23d, and in Russian as the 27th.

F is the first rune, and it is represented hieroglyph-ically by a horned snake. It is often vicariously converted into other letters or sounds, especially into labials, as in the following examples: Lat. frater, frango, fagus, Eng. brother, break, beech; Lat. pes, pugnare, porculns, Eng. foot, fight, Ger. Ferkel; Lat. ferrum, fili-us, folium, fugere, formosus, fabulari, fames, furari, Span, (since the 14th century) hierro, liijo, hoja, huir, hermoso, hablar, hambre, hur-tar. The Greek Ǿ the Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese uniformly replace by f. F sometimes also interchanges with gutturals, as Germ. Schacht, Eng. shaft; Dutch achter, Eng. after; Germ, kricchcn, Eng. creep and crafty. In English and French it alternates with v in grammatical forms, as wife, wives; natif, native. The Greek sometimes becomes f as Theodoros, Russ. Fedor; Lat. fores, fera. Very peculiar are the transformations of the Latin fl (also pl) into Spanish ll and Portuguese ch; as flamma, Span, llama, Port, chamma, etc. The Devanagari, and most graphic systems of eastern Asia derived from it, have no F. The sound exists in the Chinese and Japanese languages. Most American languages are guttural, and lack among others the sound of f.-As a numeral in the middle ages, F was equivalent to 40, and f to 40,000.It signifies 80 in Arabic, and 10,000 in Armenian. Its substitute ph stands for 500 in Russian and Georgian; while the Phoenician, Chaldaic, and Syriac vau designated 6. As an abbreviation, F stands for filius, fecit, Flavius, Fahrenheit; for forte in music, and ff for fortissimo. F is marked on the French coins of Angers, on the Prussian of Magdeburg, and on the Austrian of Hall in the Tyrol. In music, it denotes the fourth diatonic interval, or the sixth string on the piano in the chromatic scale, and is called fa in the solfeggio.