Word-initial ff means the digraph at the beginning of a word, which is an anomalous feature, in

lower case Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...

, of a few

proper name A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa'', ''Jupiter'', ''Sarah'', ''Microsoft)'' as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, ...

s in English. In that setting it has no phonetic difference from , and has been explained as a misunderstanding of

palaeography Palaeography ( UK) or paleography ( US; ultimately from grc-gre, , ''palaiós'', "old", and , ''gráphein'', "to write") is the study of historic writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, including the analysi ...

. In other words, , which is "Latin small ligature ff", a

stylistic ligature In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters 'a' and 'e' are joined for the first ...

from

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

, available now in some

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greece, Greek city of Cumae, in southe ...

fonts, represented in certain traditional handwriting styles the upper case . In

Spanish orthography Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping ...

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

In English

Mark Antony Lower Mark Antony Lower F.S.A. M.A. (1813–1876) was a Sussex historian and schoolteacher who founded the Sussex Archaeological Society. An anti-Catholic propagandist Lower is believed to have started the "cult of the Sussex Martyrs", although he w ...

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." Later in the 19th century the palaeographer

Edward Maunde Thompson Sir Edward Maunde Thompson (4 May 1840 – 14 September 1929) was a British palaeographer and Principal Librarian and first Director of the British Museum. He is noted for his handbook of Greek and Latin palaeography and for his study of Wi ...

wrote from the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docume ...

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. Usage in names such as

Charles ffoulkes Charles John ffoulkes (1868–1947) was a British historian, and curator of the Royal Armouries at London. He was a younger son of the Reverend Edmund ffoulkes. He wrote extensively on medieval arms and armour. ffoulkes was selected as the Cura ...

and Richard ffrench-Constant persists. The initial Ff in Welsh spelling of imported proper names has been attributed to the standing of ff as part of normal

Welsh orthography Welsh orthography uses 29 letters (including eight digraphs) of the Latin script to write native Welsh words as well as established loanwords. The acute accent (), the grave accent (), the circumflex (, , or ) and the diaeresis mark () are ...

. Citing Trevor Davenport-Ffoulkes, H. L. Mencken in a supplement to ''

The American Language ''The American Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States'', first published in 1919, is H. L. Mencken's book about the English language as spoken in the United States. Origins and concept Mencken was inspired by ...

'' wrote that "The initial Ff is sometimes written ff, but this is an error."

David Crystal David Crystal, (born 6 July 1941) is a British linguist, academic, and prolific author best known for his works on linguistics and the English language. Family Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, on 6 July 1941 after his mother had ...

cites both Welsh-derived proper names, such as Ffion (where single F would sound like English v in Welsh phonetics), and English-derived names such as Ffoulkes.

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. It can be observed to have come in strongly for Spanish spelling during the 13th century. The actual pronunciation was dynamic, with the aspiration being dropped from the time when

Madrid Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), an ...

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.Sonia Kania, ''The Probanza de méritos of Vicente de Zaldívar: Edition and Notes to Part 4'', Romance Philology Vol. 67, No. 2 (Fall 2013), pp. 261–316, at p. 268. Published by: Brepols; University of California Press

Notes

{{reflist Latin-script orthographies