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Alphabet Letters

Fert Ф

Cyrillic Letters

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Origin Developed in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire

Fert is the twenty-second letter of Cyrillic and writes f, taking its shape and its numeral 500 from Greek phi. Slavonic had no native f, so the letter exists to write Greek words and names, chiefly the vocabulary of the Gospels and the liturgy, and it is rare in native material. Its name is not a Slavonic word and no sense has been recovered for it, which places it among the opaque names at the tail of the alphabet. The Russian idiom for standing with hands on hips, described as standing like a fert, comes from the shape of the letter and is one of the few traces of the old letter names in ordinary modern speech.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
Developed in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire 2
Place of Origin
The First Bulgarian Empire, in the school of the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, with Preslav and Ohrid the two centres most often named 2
Origin of the Name
Taken over along with the Greek letter phi, whose numeral value 500 it also carries; Slavonic had no native f, so the sign and its name were both borrowed rather than devised, though no independent sense for the name itself survives. 1
Attributions
Associated Sound
The consonant f 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Open Questions
Sense of the Name
No recovered Slavonic sense. The name belongs to the group of opaque letter names at the tail of the alphabet, alongside kher, tsy and sha 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Nobody holds a position on what, if anything, these names meant. They are not competing readings with camps behind them; the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin and no investigation has settled them. An open question on this letter states what would close the gap and which discipline would have to do it.
Identity
Script Type
An alphabet: one letter to a sound, built on Greek uncial letterforms with additional signs, several of them taken from Glagolitic, for the Slavonic sounds Greek could not write 1
Position
The twenty-second letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The Russian idiom for standing with hands on hips, described as standing like a fert, comes directly from the shape of this letter and is one of the few traces of the old letter names surviving in ordinary modern speech. 1
Learn More
Fert: The Letter for a Sound Slavonic Did Not Have

Fert stands twenty second, writes f, and carries the numeral 500 from Greek phi. Its name is the one item in the alphabet's vocabulary that nobody has satisfactorily explained.

The sound is the point. Slavonic had no native f. Every word in which the letter occurs is a borrowing, almost all of them from Greek and most of them proper names or terms of the church, so the letter exists in the alphabet to write words that came in with the religion the alphabet was made to serve. That is a common pattern in the history of writing and it is unusually clean here, because the borrowing and the alphabet arrived together.

Speakers regularly substituted sounds their language did have, and the manuscripts show it: names spelled with this letter in one copy appear with p or with a cluster in another. Those substitutions are useful evidence, because they show how the Greek vocabulary was actually being pronounced by Slavs rather than how it was supposed to be.

The letter has a companion, fita, which also writes f and which exists to transliterate a different Greek letter. Which of the two is written in a given word depends on the Greek spelling behind it, and knowing that is a matter of vocabulary rather than of sound. Both survived until the modern reforms; Russian abolished fita in 1918 and kept fert.

A Letter Name Nobody Has Explained

Almost every Cyrillic letter name is an ordinary Slavonic word whose meaning is plain: I, letters, I know, word, good, it is, live, very, earth, who, how, people, think, ours, he, rest, say, word, firm, learning. The list is coherent enough that its exceptions stand out, and fert is the clearest of them.

No accepted etymology exists. Proposals have been made from Greek, from Slavonic and from other directions, and none has carried the field. The letter kher, which follows shortly after, is in a similar position, and the two are regularly discussed together because they are the pair of names that resist the pattern the rest of the alphabet follows so consistently.

Something can be said about why. Both letters write sounds that are not native to Slavonic and occur only in borrowed vocabulary. A naming scheme that works by choosing a common word beginning with the right sound has nothing to work with when the language contains no common word beginning with that sound, so whoever named these letters had to do something else, and what they did is no longer recoverable.

That is a real gap and not a small one, because the letter names are among the best evidence there is for how the alphabet was taught and what its makers were thinking. The atlas records it as an open question rather than choosing among the proposals, and the discipline that would settle it is historical Slavic lexicology working on the earliest alphabet lists.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived From

Phi φ, Alphabet Letters

Fert takes its shape from Greek phi and its numeral value of 500 from the same letter. The sound is not native to Slavonic and occurs only in borrowed words.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Fert is a letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet, which was assembled to write Old Church Slavonic and which takes its letter names from that language.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt

Related To

Fita Ѳ, Alphabet Letters

Fert and fita both write f in Slavonic. Which is used depends on whether the Greek word behind the spelling had a phi or a theta, so the choice is a matter of etymology rather than of sound.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt
Fritu Ⱇ, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic fert answers to Glagolitic fritu, both writing f with the value 500, and in both scripts the sound occurs only in borrowed words.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996on the Slavic alphabets, their letters and their numeral systemsView the Source
2. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius
Francis Dvornik, Rutgers University Press, 1970on the Moravian mission and the making of the Slavic lettersView the Source
The Unicode Standard
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Consortiumon the encoded characters, their names and their block assignmentView the Source
Old Church Slavonic Grammar
Horace G. Lunt, Mouton de Gruyter, 2001View the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the opaque letter names at the end of the Slavic alphabets, fert, kher, tsy and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?

The first twenty letter names of both Slavic alphabets are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vedi, I know letters, through rtsy slovo tverdo, say the word firmly. After that point the names stop meaning anything recoverable. The reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin and offers no reading. This is not a disagreement between scholars with rival etymologies; it is an absence. Nobody has established whether these names are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never meant anything at all, and the question has not been taken up.

What would resolve this A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses that the plain lists do not. A finding that the names are demonstrably meaningless would settle the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.
Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philologyPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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