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F (named ''ef''〔Spelled ''eff'' as a verb〕 )〔"F", ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' 2nd edition (1989); "ef", "eff", "bee" (under "bee eff"), ''op. cit.''〕 is the sixth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. ==History== The origin of 'F' is the Semitic letter ''vâv'' (or ''waw'') that represented a sound like or . Graphically it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as that which represented the word ''mace'' (transliterated as ḥ(dj)): The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, ''upsilon'' (which resembled its descendant 'Y' but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters 'U', 'V', and 'W'); and with another form, as a consonant, ''digamma'', which resembled 'F', but indicated the pronunciation , as in Phoenician. (After disappeared from Greek, ''digamma'' was used only as a numeral.) In Etruscan, 'F' probably represented , as in Greek, and the Etruscans formed the digraph 'FH' to represent . When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' (from Greek ''upsilon'') to stand for as well as , leaving 'F' available for . (At that time, the Greek letter phi 'Φ' represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive , though in Modern Greek it approximates the sound of .) And so out of the various ''vav'' variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which its antecedents in Greek and Etruscan did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages. The lowercase ' f ' is not related to the visually similar long s, ' ſ ' (or medial s). The use of the ''long s'' largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ' f ' when using a short mid-bar (see more at: S). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「F」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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