Pe (Semitic letter)

Pe is the seventeenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Pē , Hebrew Pē , Aramaic Pē , Syriac Pē ܦ, and Arabic (in abjadi order).

The original sound value is a voiceless bilabial plosive: ; it retains this value in most Semitic languages, except for Arabic, where the sound changed into the voiceless labiodental fricative , carrying with it the pronunciation of the letter.
Not to be confused with the Turned g.
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, فا ''fah'').

Hebrew Pe

The Hebrew spelling is . It is also romanized pei or pey, especially when used in Yiddish.

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.

Variant forms of Pe/Fe

A notable variation on the letter Pe is the Pe Kefulah (Doubled Pe), also known as the Pei Lefufah (Wrapped Pe). The Pe Kefulah is written as a small Pe scribed within a larger Pe. This atypical letter appears in Torah scrolls (most often Yemenite Torahs but is also present in Sephardic and Ashkenazi Torahs), manuscripts, and some modern printed Hebrew Bibles. When the Pe is written in the form of a Doubled Pe, this adds a layer of deeper meaning to the Biblical text. This letter variation can appear on the final and non-final forms of the Pe.

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, . There are various rules in Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used.

Fe

When Pe appears ''without'' the dagesh dot in its center (), then it usually represents a voiceless labiodental fricative .

Final form of Pe/Fe

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

When a word in modern Hebrew borrowed from another language ends with , the non-final form is used (e.g. "Philip"), while borrowings ending in still use the Pe Sofit (e.g. "fun", from Arabic). This is because native Hebrew words, which always use the final form at the end, cannot end in .

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

The letter is named '. It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:

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

Examples on usage in Modern Standard Arabic:
* ' ( ) is a multi-function prefix most commonly equivalent to "so" or "so that." For example: ' ("we write") → ' ("so we write").

Maghrebi variant

In Maghrebi scripts, the i'ajami dot in ' has traditionally been written underneath (). Once the prevalent style, it is now mostly used in countries of the Maghreb in ceremonial situations or for writing Qur'an, with the exception of Libya and Algeria, which adopted the Mashriqi form (dot above).

The Maghrebi alphabet, to write ' (), a letter that resembles ' () in the initial and medial forms is used, but it is really a ' with a single dot ().

Central Asian variant

In the Arabic orthographies of Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz, the letter ' has a descender in the final and isolated positions, much like the Maghrebi version of '.

Theoretically this shape could be approximated by using , but in practice is used in databases of these languages, and most commercial fonts for these languages give the codepoint of the usual Arabic ' a shape like .

When the Uyghur keyboard layout for Microsoft Windows was first added in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, the key combination resulted in . The Uyghur keyboard layout in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 changed that key combination to give . On the newer systems, the old keyboard layout is still available under the name Uyghur (Legacy).

Diacriticized Arabic versions

Normally, the letter ' renders sound, but may also be used some names and loanwords where it can render , might be arabized as in accordance to its spelling, e.g., (Unilever). It may be used interchangeably with the modified letter - ' (with 3 dots above) in this case.

The character is mapped in Unicode under position U+06A4.

Maghrebi variant

The Maghrebi style, used in Northwestern Africa, the dots moved underneath (Unicode U+06A5), because it is based on the other style of ():

Other similar letters

Character encodings

References

External links

{{Northwest Semitic abjad

Phoenician alphabet
Faʼ
Hebrew letters
Letters with final form