# /f/ (consonant)



## Ben Jamin

[Moderator's Note: The following discussion is split from this thread of the Other Languages forum]


涼宮 said:


> It's interesting that a language doesn't have such a common sound like /f/.


All ‘f’ sounds in Slavic languages come from relatively late foreign loans. In the middle ages there was no ‘f’ in the Slavic languages, and the ‘f-s’ in loans were assimilated to ‘p’.
The Ancient Greek didn’t use the ‘f’ either, but had an aspirated ‘p’ (ph), later developed into ‘f’.


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## Dib

/f/ has been traditionally unknown in most Indian languages too. But many languages are now showing a pʰ>f shift.


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## ESustad

Korean doesn't have /f/.  They substitute /p/ for it.


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## Awwal12

In most Turkic languages /f/ exists in loanwords or is just absent too. In Finnic languages the situation is nearly identical (with the most noticeable exception of the Mordvinic sub-branch). In Japanese [f] (or, actually, [ɸ]) is merely an allophone of /h/ before /u/. Etc., and so on. I wouldn't call [f] a *very* common sound.


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## Christo Tamarin

It is supposed that PIE (the Proto-Indo-European language) did not have the f-sound.

Old Slavonic did not have that sound: it was approximated by P.


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## Dymn

In Tagalog there isn't the /f/ sound either, and /p/ is used instead. For example, the country itself is called _Pilipinas_.


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## Red Arrow

涼宮 said:


> მადლობა!  It's interesting that a language doesn't have such a common sound like /f/.


The only sounds I would call common are: p t k i u l m n s
But even those sounds aren't universal  In Hawaiian, t and k are allophones, and 's' is completely absent.


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## Messquito

Chinese's f's are supposed to have derived from *, [p] and [pʰ].
Wiki:*


> *Labiodentalization[edit]*
> Early Middle Chinese (EMC) labials (/p, pʰ, b, m/) become Late Middle Chinese (LMC) labiodentals (/f, f, bv, ʋ/, possibly from earlier affricates)[14] in certain circumstances involving a following glide. When this happens, the glide disappears. Using Baxter's reconstruction, the triggering circumstances can be expressed simply as whenever a labial is followed by a glide /j/ and the main vowel is a back vowel; other reconstructions word the rule differently. According to Baxter, however, labiodentalization might have occurred independently of each other in different areas. For example, some variants retain OC /m/ before the glide, while in other variants, it had developed into a labiodental initial (微): compare Cantonese 文 _man4_ and Mandarin 文 _wén_.


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## Armas

Finnish has f only in relatively recently borrowed words. In older loans the source language's f became v in the beginning of a word, hv in the middle. Had falafel been known earlier it would probably be _valahveli_.

Edit: Finnish v is pronounced [ʋ].


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## Olaszinhok

_*It's interesting that a language doesn't have such a common sound like /f/.*_

It may seem strange that a Language like Spanish doesn't have a common sound like /V/ or /SH/, but Spanish lacks lots of phonemes compared to other IE languages.


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## ilocas2

Some Slavic languages have lots of f's not in loanwords but they are devoiced v's.

in Czech _lev_ (lion) is pronounced _lef_, _kavka_ (jackdaw) is pronounced _kafka_, _v Americe_ (in America) is pronounced _famerice_ etc.


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## bibax

ilocas2 said:


> ... _v Americe_ (in America) is pronounced _famerice_ etc.


More precisely fʔameritse (nom. ʔamerika), in pronunciation the written (etymologic) *v* is always devoiced before a voiceless consonant (ʔ = glottal stop is voiceless).


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## Ectab

The Arabic f is originally an aspirated p in proto semitic and arabic.


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## TitTornade

As an illustration : how do you say/write "France" in your country/language if you don't have the sound/letter "f" ?


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## Red Arrow

TitTornade said:


> As an illustration : how do you say/write "France" in your country/language if you don't have the sound/letter "f" ?


In Finnish, the f is dropped. In Estonian, the f is replaced by a p.


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## Olaszinhok

Red Arrow :D said:


> In Finnish, the f is dropped. In Estonian, the f is replaced by a p.



Do Estonians pronounce Prance?


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## Red Arrow

Yes, France = Prantsusmaa and French = Prantsuse


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## fdb

TitTornade said:


> As an illustration : how do you say/write "France" in your country/language if you don't have the sound/letter "f" ?



There are lots of examples here: France - Wiktionary


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## Encolpius

I think f is a common sound in Hungarian, examples: fekete (black), áfonya (cranberry), kofa (market woman), kefe (brush), csúf (ugly)...


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## merquiades

In the middle ages Spanish lost the /f/ sound in a process in which first it became /h/ and then went silent:   facer/ fablar/ almofada/ forno > hacer/ hablar/ almohada/ horno etc.
The /f/ was reinstated years later with loan words from classical Latin or other languages, or in some cases words were corrected.
I believe this also occurred in the Gascon language in southern France


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## Dymn

merquiades said:


> I believe this also occurred in the Gascon language in southern France


Yes, although it is still pronounced as /h/, like in some dialects of Spanish as a matter of fact, e.g. in Cantabria and Extremadura.


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## AndrasBP

Ectab said:


> The Arabic f is originally an aspirated p in proto semitic and arabic.


The same in Greek: the letter φ (phi) represented an aspirated [pʰ] sound in Ancient Greek, hence the romanized transliteration "ph". In Modern Greek, φ is pronounced [f].



Olaszinhok said:


> Do Estonians pronounce Prance?


Lithuanians do this too.
In Lithuanian, /f/ only appears in recent loans. The name of France was borrowed earlier, so it appears as "*P*rancūzija" and the French language is "*p*rancūzų kalba" in Lithuanian.
Some older Lithuanians are still unable to pronounce /f/. A woman who I knew, born in the 1930s, pronounced the words "fabrikas" (= factory), "delfinas" (= dolphin) and "Alfonzas" (Alfons, her husband's name) as "pabrikas", "delpinas" and "Alponzas".


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## Awwal12

Olaszinhok said:


> Do Estonians pronounce Prance?


In many Russian dialects it was [x]rantsiya till the XX century.


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## AndrasBP

Awwal12 said:


> In many Russian dialects it was [x]rantsiya till the XX century.


Interesting. Do you know if they substituted [f] with a [x] in other words, too?


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## Awwal12

AndrasBP said:


> Interesting. Do you know if they substituted [f] with a [x] in other words, too?


They basically substituted [f] with [xʋ]~[xw], but before other consonants and in the coda it was just [x]. It was a predominant model to subsitiute [f] through the Russian dialects which didn't have it. Using [p] for that purpose also existed but was generally marginal (however it was the only variant in Ukrainian and Belarusian until they actually loaned [f]).
For those Russian dialects which had [v] producing [f] was not a problem (it was regularly produced in positional devoicing of [v] anyway), but the trouble is that a lot of Russian dialects didn't have [v] either (in the Old Russian dialects of the Vladimir area it was a development of earlier [ʋ] and it was slowly spreading through other dialects since then, but many other dialects retained the original [ʋ] or, more frequently, produced [u̯]~[w] from it, which was predominant in South Russian dialects until recently).


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## Red Arrow

So the English word Moscow is actually not that far off in terms of pronunciation?


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## Awwal12

Red Arrow :D said:


> So the English word Moscow is actually not that far off in terms of pronunciation?


It depends. In the very Moscow, the consonant system is (and historically was) basically North Russian, with most characteristic features of the old Vladimir-Rostov dialects (the fricative [v] included). But in the southern, Belarusian and Ukrainian dialects "Mosko[f]" would unavoidably get a final approximant/semivowel at least by analogy (morphological and lexical).


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## AndrasBP

Encolpius said:


> I think f is a common sound in Hungarian,


There are lots of basic Hungarian words starting with /f/, but it's a secondary development, a consonant shift from /p/ in the Proto-Hungarian period.
All the other Finno-Ugric languages have word-initial /p/ in the cognate words.


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## Penyafort

Olaszinhok said:


> It may seem strange that a Language like Spanish doesn't have a common sound like /V/ or /SH/, but Spanish lacks lots of phonemes compared to other IE languages.



Medieval Spanish had many of the phonemes in the other Romance languages, those two included. The simplification is a result of later mergers.



merquiades said:


> In the middle ages Spanish lost the /f/ sound in a process in which first it became /h/ and then went silent:   facer/ fablar/ almofada/ forno > hacer/ hablar/ almohada/ horno etc.
> The /f/ was reinstated years later with loan words from classical Latin or other languages, or in some cases words were corrected.
> I believe this also occurred in the Gascon language in southern France



Spanish never really lost f's, because diphthongs prevented that from happening. That is, you have _hoguera _but _fuego_, _hontanar _but _fuente_, etc.

Gascon did indeed go that far and turn f's into h's even before diphthong: _huèc, huèlha..._


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## Red Arrow

How ‘F’ Sounds Might Break a Fundamental Rule of Linguistics


> The authors argue that sounds like _f_ and _v_ weren’t part of human language until farming appeared during the Neolithic age. Agriculture, they say, allowed humans to eat soft foods, which changed the way their jaws developed throughout life, which shaped the kinds of sounds their mouths were capable of making.
> (...)
> In fact, the authors of the _Science_ study estimated that it’s nearly 30 percent easier for people with an overbite to make labiodental sounds than it is for people with edge-to-edge bites.


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## Awwal12

Let's say I'd call half the claims and conclusions simply unscientific here.
While, indeed, earlier human populations seemingly would have greater difficulties producing labiodentals, it is positively impossible to claim that those just didn't exist in early human languages.


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## Sardokan1.0

Penyafort said:


> Gascon did indeed go that far and turn f's into h's even before diphthong: _huèc, huèlha..._



This phenomenon is present in specific areas of central Sardinia, where the paleo-Sardinian language supposedly survived longer than in other areas of the island. In those areas the *F* is replaced by an aspirated sound; the same phenomenon often also applies to *C*.

Example :

Sardinian (Barbaricino) - Sardinian (Logudorese)

_*h*untana - *f*untana (fountain)
*h*ocu - *f*ogu (fire)
*h*àmene - *f*àmene (hunger)
*h*èmina - *f*èmina (woman)
*h*àchere - *f*àghere (to do)
*h*usile - *f*usile (rifle)
*h*uste - *f*uste (cane, staff)

vi*h*inadu - bi*c*hinadu, bi*g*hinadu (neighbourhood)
*h*ane - *c*ane (dog)
*h*osa - *c*osa (thing)
*h*u*h*ùmere - *c*u*c*ùmere, *c*u*g*ùmere (cucumber)
*h*o*h*inare - *c*o*c*hinare, *c*o*g*hinare (to cook)_


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## Penyafort

Sardokan1.0 said:


> This phenomenon is present in specific areas of central Sardinia, where the paleo-Sardinian language supposedly survived longer than in other areas of the island. In those areas the *F* is replaced by an aspirated sound; the same phenomenon often also applies to *C*.



Interesting, I hadn't heard about it. Is that h aspirated or silent?


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## Sardokan1.0

It's aspirated.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Regarding the Slavic languages and the f consonant:
/f/ exists in Slavic languages in onomatopeias, for example (Sl. fuj, fru-fru, fej etc.)

What is interesting with /f/ consonant in BCS is this. This is only a regional variety. There are only two words where this is affected.

hvala (thank you) hv becomes f and we have a regional variety fala
hvatati (to catch) hv becomes f and we have a regional variety fatati
This is an exception here:
shvatiti (to understand something) here hv becomes v and we have a regional variety svatiti


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## nimak

@dihydrogen monoxide

What you call a regional variety in BCS is in fact the norm in the Macedonian standard language.

The Old Slavonic group -хв- (-hv-) became -ф- (-f-) in Macedonian:

фали, пофали, пофалба, фати, фатен, се нафаќа, зафати, пофаќа, префати, фрла, сфати, сфаќа...
fali, pofali, pofalba, fati, faten, se nafaḱa, zafati, pofaḱa, prefati, frla, sfati, sfaḱa...

By the way, some Macedonians often misspell _сфаќа_ (sfaḱa) and _сваќа_ (svaḱa) 
сфаќа (sfaḱa) = understands something; _verb, 3rd p. sg._
сваќа (svaḱa) = female guest at wedding; свадба (svadba) = wedding


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## Awwal12

/Hv/ > /f/ also occurs in some Russian dialects (falít', fost, fatát' etc.). Probably at first the usual adaptation of /f/ as /h(v)/ had occured in those dialects, and subsequently all /hv/ combinations were "corrected" to /f/ (including those where there was no /f/ originally).


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## dihydrogen monoxide

It's interesting that /hv/ combination involves very limited number of words.


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## Gavril

Another example of the substitution [f] > [xw] is Welsh _Chwefror_ "February" (pronounced ['xwev.ror]), from Latin _Februarius_.

I don't know if there are any other cases of this substitution in Welsh; usually, it seems to retain Latin labiodentals as such (cf. Welsh _ffa_ "beans" < L. _faba_, or _ffurf_ "form" < _forma_, where _ff_ = [f]).

Maybe the [xw] in _Chwefror_ is a case of rare/irregular dissimilation from the other labiodental sound [v] in the same word.

The only "indigenous" cases of [f] in Welsh are the result of sound changes that had not occurred, or at least were not complete, at the time of contact with Latin.


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