Ef or Fe (Ф ф; italics:
Ф ф) is a Cyrillic letter, commonly representing the voiceless labiodental fricative pronounced as //f//, like the pronunciation of (f) in "fill, flee, or fall". The Cyrillic letter Ef is romanized as (f).The Cyrillic letter Ef was derived from the Greek letter Phi (Φ φ). It merged with and eliminated the letter Fita (Ѳ) in the Russian alphabet in 1918.
The name of Ef in the Early Cyrillic alphabet is Church Slavic; Old Slavonic; Church Slavonic; Old Bulgarian; Old Church Slavonic: {{Script|Cyrs|фрьтъ (Church Slavic; Old Slavonic; Church Slavonic; Old Bulgarian; Old Church Slavonic: fr̥tŭ or Church Slavic; Old Slavonic; Church Slavonic; Old Bulgarian; Old Church Slavonic: frĭtŭ), in later Church Slavonic and Russian form it became Russian: фертъ (Russian: fert).[1]
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Ef has a value of 500.
The Slavic languages have almost no native words containing pronounced as //f//. This sound did not exist in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It arose in Greek and Latin from PIE (which yielded Slavic pronounced as //b//). 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 ф is thus almost exclusively found in words of foreign origin, especially Greek (from φ and sometimes from θ), 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 фукать, фыркать 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 pronounced as //f// unless it is before a palatalizing vowel, when it represents pronounced as //fʲ//.
The phraseologism "стоять фертом", "to stand as fert" means "to stand with arms akimbo".