Word-initial ff

The digraph ff at the beginning of a word is an anomalous feature, in lower case, of a few proper names in English.

In other words, ff, which is "Latin small ligature ff ", a stylistic ligature from Unicode, available now in some Latin script fonts, represented in certain traditional handwriting styles the upper case F. In Spanish orthography, on the other hand, word-initial ff had a phonetic meaning, over a period of some centuries.

Mark Antony Lower in his Patronymica Brittanica (1860) called this spelling an affectation.

[8] The actual pronunciation was dynamic, with the aspiration being dropped from the time when Madrid became the Spanish capital (1561).

The word-initial ff spelling convention lagged behind current phonetics, providing a way of tracking pronunciations after they had become obsolete.