Word-initial ff

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The digraph ff at the beginning of a word is an anomalous feature, in

stylistic ligature from Unicode, available now in some Latin script
fonts, represented in certain traditional handwriting styles the upper case F.

In Spanish orthography, on the other hand, word-initial ff had a phonetic meaning, over a period of some centuries.

In English

Early modern court hand alphabet, showing "ff" used as the equivalent of a capital F

Mark Antony Lower in his Patronymica Brittanica (1860) called this spelling an affectation. He stated that it originated in "a foolish mistake concerning the ff of old manuscripts, which is no duplication, but simply a capital f."[1] Later in the 19th century the palaeographer Edward Maunde Thompson wrote from the British Museum:[2]

The English legal handwriting of the Middle Ages has no capital F. A double f (ff) was used to represent the capital letter. In transcribing, I should write F, not ff; e. g. Fiske, not ffiske.

The replacement of manuscript word-initial ff by F is now a scholarly convention.[3]

Usage in names such as

Ffoulkes.[6]

In Spanish

It has been argued that word-initial ff was used in written Spanish around 1500, to indicate the phonetic difference between an f-sound and an aspirated h.[7] It can be observed to have come in strongly for Spanish spelling during the 13th century.[8] The actual pronunciation was dynamic, with the aspiration being dropped from the time when Madrid became the Spanish capital (1561). The word-initial ff spelling convention lagged behind current phonetics, providing a way of tracking pronunciations after they had become obsolete.[9]

Notes

  1. ^ Lower, Mark Antony (1860). Patronymica Britannica: A Dictionary of the Family Names of the United Kingdom. J. R. Smith. p. 112.
  2. ISBN 978-0-7884-0652-2
    .
  3. ISBN 978-0-674-37560-4
    .
  4. ^ Notes and Queries. Oxford University Press. 1879. p. 391.
  5. ^ Mencken, H. L. (1962). The American Language, Supplement II. p. 460 note 2.
  6. ISBN 978-1-84765-822-7
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-19-151098-4
    .
  8. JSTOR 469896
  9. JSTOR 44742013
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