Fi ࠐ

Fi is the seventeenth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value eighty. It stands where Hebrew has pe, and its name records the reading of the letter in the Samaritan tradition, where it is sounded f rather than p. That is why the standard character name for it is Fi.

The Tiberian reading of Hebrew gives this letter two pronunciations, a stop and a fricative, distributed by position and marked in pointed texts with a dot. The Samaritan tradition arrives at a different result by a different route, and the Samaritan script has no dot to mark anything with. The letter is written one way and read the way the community reads it.

It is also one of the five letters the square Hebrew script writes differently at the end of a word. Samaritan has no final forms at all, so this letter, like the other four, keeps one shape in every position.

Greek took the sign as pi, keeping the p and the seventeenth place, and Latin took it as P. The Latin letter F comes from somewhere else entirely, from the sixth sign by way of Greek digamma, so the resemblance between the Samaritan name Fi and the Latin letter F is a coincidence of two separate sound histories rather than a relationship between the letters.

The character is encoded at U+0810.

Arabic became the spoken language of the Samaritan community, as it did across the region, and the community went on writing. Some of what it produced in Arabic is written in the Arabic script, and some of it is Arabic language in Samaritan letters, a practice with parallels in other communities of the region that kept their own scripts while changing their speech.

Writing one language in another language script is more common in the history of writing than it looks from a modern vantage point, where scripts and languages are usually paired one to one. It happens wherever a community has a script it regards as its own and a spoken language it shares with its neighbours. The script then marks who the text belongs to rather than what language it is in, and a reader outside the community may be unable to read a text in a language they speak fluently.

For the Samaritan alphabet this is the third language it has carried, after Hebrew and Aramaic, and it is the one that shows most clearly what the script is for. An alphabet of twenty-two consonantal signs is not a good fit for Arabic, which has twenty-eight consonants and needs more distinctions than these letters supply. Using it anyway is a choice about identity rather than about convenience, and it is the same choice, in a different century, that kept the community writing Paleo-Hebrew letters when everyone around it had moved to the square script.