Fita

Shape

In traditional (Church Slavonic) typefaces, the central line is typically about twice the width of the letter's body and has serifs similar to those on the letter Т: [[File:Early-Cyrillic-letter-Fita.svg|40px]]. Sometimes the line is drawn as low as the baseline, which makes the letter difficult to distinguish from Д.

Usage

Old Russian and Church Slavonic

The traditional Russian name of the letter is фита́ fitá (or, in pre-1918 spelling, ѳита́). Fita was mainly used to write proper names and loanwords derived from or via Greek. Russians pronounced these names with the sound instead of (like the pronunciation of in "thin"), for example "Theodore" was pronounced as "Feodor" (now "Fyodor").

Early texts in Russian (and in the Russian recension of Church Slavonic) demonstrate an increasing interchangeability of Ѳ and Ф. Some scribes preferred one of the two letters and ignored the other. There existed an orthographical system to write Ѳ in an initial position and Ф elsewhere. Since the middle of the 17th century, selection between Ѳ and Ф was re-adjusted to exactly follow the Greek origin, the system still in use in Church Slavonic orthography.

Russian

In the first variant of the Petrine Russian alphabet (1707–1708), the letter fita was eliminated and fe (Ф) became the only way to represent . But in the 19th century, the letter fita was restored and both letters co-existed until the 1918 spelling reform, when fita was replaced by fe again.

Many Greek words with theta were adopted in Russian with te (Т т) instead of fita (mostly through Latin or other Western European languages): теорема (theorem), атлетъ (athlete), пантера (panther), фталевый (phthalic), etc. Sometimes dual spellings/pronunciations existed: ѳеатръ/театръ (theatre), аѳеизмъ/атеизмъ (atheism), алгориѳмъ/алгоритмъ (algorithm), каѳолическій/католическій (Catholic), etc.; the variants with fita (in modern spelling with Ф) are typically more archaic or special.

Other languages

In other languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet, fita was pronounced and was replaced with te (Т т). For example, the Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian version of Theodore is Тодор Todor or Теодор Teodor.

Romanian

Called thita, is part of the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, which was used until about 1860.

Aleut

Fita was used in the first Cyrillic version of the Aleut alphabet, typically in loanwords.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Θ θ/ϑ : Greek letter theta
• Ө ө : Cyrillic letter oe, currently used in the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tuvan, and Mongolian languages

Computing codes

|0472|name1=Cyrillic Capital Letter Fita |0473|name2=Cyrillic Small Letter Fita

References

References

1. "ISO 9:1995: Information and documentation — Transliteration of Cyrillic characters into Latin characters — Slavic and non-Slavic languages". International Organization for Standardization.