Pe (Semitic letter)

Not to be confused with the Turned g. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Pi (Π), Latin P, Glagolitic Ⱂ,[1] and Cyrillic П. Pe is usually assumed to come from a pictogram of a "mouth" (in Hebrew pe; in Arabic, فا fah).

Examples on usage in Modern Standard Arabic: In Maghrebi scripts, the i'ajami dot in fāʼ has traditionally been written underneath (ڢ).

Once the prevalent style, it is now mostly used in countries of the Maghreb in ceremonial situations or for writing Qur'an, with the exception of Libya and Algeria, which adopted the Mashriqi form (dot above).

In the Arabic orthographies of Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz, the letter fā’ has a descender in the final and isolated positions, much like the Maghrebi version of qāf.

The letter fāʾ with three dots above is no longer used in Persian, as the [β]-sound changed to [b], e.g. archaic زڤان /zaβɑn/ > زبان /zæbɒn/ 'language'[6] The character is mapped in Unicode under position U+06A4.

There are two orthographic variants of this letter which indicate a different pronunciation: When the Pe has a "dot" in its center, known as a dagesh, it represents a voiceless bilabial plosive, /p/.

When Pe appears without the dagesh dot in its center (פ), then it usually represents a voiceless labiodental fricative /f/.