Word-initial ff

alphabet, showing "ff" used as the equivalent of a capital F In English, proper names are conventionally capitalized, which makes the appearance of a lowercase letter at the beginning of one unusual. Furthermore, (no matter the capitalization) is an extremely rare digraph to find at the beginning of English words otherwise, only occurring in loanwords, neologisms, acronyms, and the like. Mark Antony Lower in his Patronymica Brittanica (1860) called this spelling "needless", "ridiculous", and "originat[ing] in a foolish mistake": Later in the 19th century the palaeographer Edward Maunde Thompson wrote from the British Museum: The replacement of manuscript word-initial by is now a scholarly convention. Usage in names such as Charles ffoulkes and Richard ffrench-Constant persists. The initial in Welsh spelling of imported proper names has been attributed to the standing of as part of normal Welsh orthography. Citing Trevor Davenport-Ffoulkes, H. L. Mencken wrote in a supplement to The American Language that "The initial Ff is sometimes written ff, but this is an error." David Crystal cites both Welsh-derived proper names, such as Ffion (where single would sound like English v in Welsh phonetics, IPA ), and English-derived names such as Ffoulkes. ==In Spanish==

It has been argued that word-initial was used in written Spanish around 1500, to indicate the phonetic difference between an f-sound and an aspirated h. It was used in medieval Spanish and, less frequently, in Early Modern Spanish. It can be observed to have come in strongly for Spanish spelling during the 13th century. Unlike the English digraph, the first f of the digraph was capitalized when it occurred in proper nouns. ==Similar Unicode character==

is a stylistic ligature from Unicode, and is widely available in most modern fonts. ==Notes==