Word-initial ff
Word-initial ff means the digraph "ff" at the beginning of a word, which is an anomalous feature, in lower case, of a few proper names in English. In that setting it has no phonetic difference from "F", and has been explained as a misunderstanding of palaeography. In other words, ff, which is "Latin small ligature ff", a stylistic ligature from Unicode, available now in some fonts, represented in certain traditional handwriting styles the upper case F.
In English
Mark Antony Lower in his Patronymica Brittanica (1860) called this spelling an wikt: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."[1] Later in the 19th century the palaeographer Edward Maunde Thompson wrote from the British Museum:
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.[2]
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.[3]
Notes
- ^ Lower, Mark Antony (1860). Patronymica Britannica: A Dictionary of the Family Names of the United Kingdom. J.R. Smith. p. 112.
- ^ New England Historic Genealogical Society Staff (2016). The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Volume 47, 1893. Heritage Books. p. 212. ISBN 978-0-7884-0652-2.
- ^ Dworkin, Steven N. (2018). A Guide to Old Spanish. Oxford University Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-19-151098-4.