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 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.