P (named pee ) is the 16th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
History
<span id="Use_in_writing_systems">Use in writing systems
In English orthography and most other European languages, ⟨p⟩ represents the sound .
A common digraph in English is ⟨ph⟩, which represents the sound , and can be used to transliterate ⟨φ⟩ phi in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph ⟨pf⟩ is common, representing a labial affricate /pf/.
Most English words beginning with ⟨p⟩ are of foreign origin, primarily French, Latin, Greek, and Slavic; these languages preserve Proto-Indo-European initial *p. Native English cognates of such words often start with ⟨f⟩, since English is a Germanic language and thus has undergone Grimm's law; a native English word with initial /p/ would reflect Proto-Indo-European initial *b, which is so rare that its existence as a phoneme is disputed.
However, native English words with non-initial ⟨p⟩ are quite common; such words can come from either Kluge's law or the consonant cluster /sp/ (PIE *p has been preserved after s).
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /p/ is used to represent the voiceless bilabial plosive.
Related characters
Ancestors, descendants and siblings
The Latin letter P represents the same sound as the Greek letter Pi, but it looks like the Greek letter Rho.
- ð¤Â : Semitic letter Pe, from which the following symbols originally derive
- Ππ : Greek letter Pi
- ðŒÂ : Old Italic and Old Latin P, which derives from Greek Pi, and is the ancestor of modern Latin P. The Roman P had this form (ðŒ) on coins and inscriptions until the reign of Claudius, ca. 50 AD (See also Claudian letters).
- ð€Â : Gothic letter pertra/pairþa, which derives from Greek Pi
- П п : Cyrillic letter Pe, which also derives from Pi
- Ⲡⲡ : Coptic letter Pi
- Ππ : Greek letter Pi
- P with diacritics: á¹" ṕ á¹– á¹— â±£ áµ½ Ƥ Æ¥ áµ± ᶈ
- Uralic Phonetic Alphabet-specific symbols related to P:
- U+1D18 á´˜ LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL P
- U+1D3E á´¾ MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL P
- U+1D56 áµ– MODIFIER LETTER SMALL P
- ₚ : Subscript small p was used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet prior to its formal standardization in 1902
Derived ligatures, abbreviations, signs and symbols
- ₱ : Philippine peso sign
- ℘ : script letter P, see Weierstrass p
- â„—Â : sound recording copyright symbol
- ♇ : Pluto symbol
- ꟼ : Reversed P was used in ancient Roman texts to stand for puella (girl)
- ê ê', ê' ê", ê", ê•Â : Various forms of P were used for medieval scribal abbreviations
Computing codes
- 1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations
See also
- Mind your Ps and Qs
- Pence or "penny," the English slang for which is p (e.g. "20p" = 20 pence)
References
External links
- Media related to P at Wikimedia Commons
- The dictionary definition of P at Wiktionary
- The dictionary definition of p at Wiktionary