(photo by M. A. AlAwaid)
“The Arabic Alphabet” website (written by Michael Beard, illustrated by Houman Mortazavi) – http://alifbatourguide.com/
The Control F Word – https://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/ghazal/
excerpt:
The Control F Word
Fâ is one of the easy ones: a little circle drawn clockwise, resting, or balancing, on the base line, slightly pointed at the bottom. There is a dot above the circle. (In Morocco you may find the dot underneath.) That’s what you’ll see in the middle of a word. The minimal shape, circle plus dot, gets a little showier at the end or the beginning. At the beginning, raised above the base line, it looks as if the circle were lifted up on a stick, balloon style (فـ). At the end of the word, the line continues on to the left (ف), and forms something like that familiar shallow pan shape one sees in a terminal Ba, Ta, or Tha.
As for the sound, it’s also easy— for us at least. I’m told there are quite a few languages that don’t have it. Old Persian was one. (F words came into Persian gradually — via loans from, I am told, Elamite and Median– which gradually got accepted as one of the family.) Phoenician didn’t have an F either, but it had a P which over time took on an F sound.
The neighborly relation between P and F is pretty well known (i.e. that speakers of Arabic have F, but not the P sound). Thus the complication of loan words from Persian into Arabic: famously, if the word has a P in Persian, it becomes either B or F in Arabic. Often enough those words got reborrowed into Persian again, F words keeping the F. Textbook examples: Persian pîl, elephant, became Arabic fîl, and kept the F when it crossed back into Persian. More famously, Persian Pars became Arabic Fars; Persian Ispahân became Persian Esfahân. Old Persian pairidaeza (a term you would see in the Avesta), garden or for paradise, drifted west to Greek and Latin (and English – our “paradise”), keeping the P sound. (In the Septuagint translation of the Bible, the Greek equivalent, παράδεισος, is used as the name of the Garden of Eden.) As an Arabic loan word, it became al-firdus ,الفردوس, a Qur’ânic word usually translated “paradise.”
V vs W
In Arabic, ف can have a meaning on its own. A simple ف is the word fa-. It attaches to the next word and works as a grammatical connective. The dictionary says “then, thus, and so, however, because, therefore.” It’s a universal joint of Arabic syntax. Sometimes it seems as common as “and.” It may feel something like English “so.” (Sometimes it’s “so” in that contemporary English use which means “a statement follows.”) I always assumed that this use of the word ف had something to do with the letter which resembles it, و, Waw, which has a similar meaning when it stands alone, wa, meaning “and.” I have it on good authority that this similarity of meanings between ف and و , F and W, is a coincidence.
But if we want to find a relationship between F and V, in Arabic, there is a visual one. It results from the absence of V sound from Arabic: loan words with a V sometimes get their own letter. Many years ago, in a store in the Kerman bazaar, I saw a container with the label اُڤالتین (Ouvâltîn). It was pretty clearly an Ovaltine container, and that ڤ with three dots was clearly there to represent a V (a voiced F). You knew from those three dots that it wasn’t a domestic product, Persian having no trouble with the V sound (their و), so that, in Persian, ڤ isn’t of any particular use. The three-dot ڤ – I found out later– is rare in Arabic too. (The only other example I’ve seen is ڤيتنام for Vietnam) but it shows up regularly to represent a V sound in Sorani Kurdish and Swahili. You can see the logic of the shape: ڤ is another case where the triple dots are devised to thicken the sound of another letter (as with ت to ث –T to TH– or س to ش — S to SH). There is variant of ڤ, written ڥ , which plays the same role of representing the V sound in Tunisia and Algeria, though for some reason it doesn’t look as thick. (This is probably just me.) Today Arabic containers of Ovaltine simply write اُفالتین with a Fa, no doubt on the assumption that customers are likely to know English and understand it on their own. Three dots no longer useful, casualties of education.
In Spanish, fulano means something like “so-and-so,” “someone or other,” as in “Fulano, Mengano, Zutano y Perengano,” which I think means something like “Tom Dick and Harry.” The origin is the Arabic word fulân, فلان (falan in Turkish, folân in Persian), where it has the same range of meanings – from an innocent “some random person,” to something more pointed, “that so-and-so,” or even “that bastard.” There is a fragment of a lost poem by the 8th-century Arab satirist Jarîrî, literary insult comic, directed at someone who is too much of a nobody to name.
وَقُلْ لِفُلَانٍ إِنْ تَجَرَّأَ مَرَّةً
سَتَعْرِفُ مَنْ يَبْقَى وَمَنْ يَتَحَوَّلُ
[Tell that nobody (that fulân ) if he tries it again (“it” not specified),
he’ll learn who holds his ground and who runs away.]
New essay: “’Ayn is for Arab” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)
New Essay: “Ṭâ Is For Talisman” on The Arabic Alphabet website
New essay: “Sîn is for Zenith” on the Arabic alphabet website
New essay: “’Ghayn is for Ghazal” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)
Come From Away 
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