Fita Ѳ

Fita stands forty second, writes f, and carries the numeral 9 from Greek theta.

It is one of the letters that exist for Greek. Slavonic has no sound of its own that requires it, and every word written with it is a borrowing, almost always a name or a term of the church. Its companion in this work is fert, which also writes f, and the two are distributed by etymology: a word whose Greek original had a phi is written with fert, and a word whose Greek original had a theta is written with fita. No Slavonic ear could tell them apart.

Its name is built on the sound it has in Slavonic rather than on the Greek name of the letter it descends from, which is itself a small record of the Byzantine pronunciation the Slavs learned.

Its numeral value of 9 kept it necessary for as long as the letter numerals were in use, since nothing else could supply that place in the units series.

It survived in Russian orthography until 1918, when the reform removed it along with yat and the decimal i, and its use had by then been reduced to a short and memorised list of words. It remains in the church books.

Where the letter was concentrated was in personal names. The stock of Christian names in Slavonic use is overwhelmingly Greek, and a large share of them contain a theta, so this letter appeared in the written form of the names a great many people carried. Abolishing it in 1918 therefore changed how a substantial part of the population spelled its own name, which is not the sort of thing a spelling reform usually has to weigh, and it is one reason the reform was felt as an intrusion by people with no view at all about the underlying phonology. The doublets it left behind, the same Greek name surviving in one form with f and another with t, are still in the naming stock today.

The reason this letter writes f is a piece of Greek history that Slavonic inherited without being party to it.

In classical Greek the letter theta wrote an aspirated t, a t followed by a puff of breath, distinct from both the plain t and from any fricative. Over the following centuries that sound changed, as the corresponding sounds in the same series did, into a fricative made with the tongue against the teeth, the sound English still writes with th.

Slavonic had no such sound. Faced with a Greek fricative their language did not contain, Slavs substituted, and the substitution that prevailed was f. Some words show t instead, and the doublets that result are still visible in Russian personal names, where the same Greek name appears in two forms, one with f and one with t, according to which route it took.

Three things follow. The letter name fita records the substituted sound rather than the Greek one, so the name itself is evidence for the pronunciation Slavs actually used. The pairing with fert is not a redundancy in Greek terms, since phi and theta were entirely different letters, and only becomes redundant once both are being read as f. And a Slavonic spelling can therefore tell a reader something about a Greek word that the Slavonic pronunciation conceals.

The letter is a small piece of evidence for the state of Greek in the ninth century, preserved by a language that had no use for the distinction it records.