Ef or Fe (ä ÃÂ; italics: ä àor <span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">ä ÃÂ</span>; italics: <span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">ä ÃÂ</span>) is a Cyrillic letter, commonly representing the voiceless labiodental fricative , like the pronunciation of in fill, flee or fall. The Cyrillic letter Ef is romanized as .
The Cyrillic letter Ef was derived from the Greek letter Phi (æ ÃÂ). It merged with and eliminated the letter Fita (ò) in the Russian alphabet in 1918.
The name of Ef in the Early Cyrillic alphabet is ( or ), in later Church Slavonic and Russian form it became ().
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Ef has a value of 500.
The Slavic languages have almost no native words containing . This sound did not exist in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It arose in Greek and Latin from PIE (which yielded Slavic ). In some instances in Latin, it represented historical th-fronting and derived from Proto-Indo-European . In the Germanic languages, the f sound arose from PIE via Grimm's law, which remained unchanged in Slavic. The letter àis thus almost exclusively found in words of foreign origin, especially Greek (from àand sometimes from ø), Latin, French, German, Dutch, English, and Turkic languages
Example borrowings in Russian:
The few native Slavic words with this letter (in different languages) are examples of onomatopoeia (like Russian verbs , etc.) or reflect sporadic pronunciation shifts:
Ef is the 21st letter of the Bulgarian alphabet; the 22nd letter of the Russian alphabet; the 23rd letter of the Belarusian alphabet; the 25th letter of the Serbian and Ukrainian alphabet; and the 26th letter of the Macedonian alphabet. It represents the consonant unless it is before a palatalizing vowel, when it represents .
The phraseologism "", "to stand as " means "to stand with arms ".