Why in the name of Og’s hairy loincloth are some English surnames conventionally spelled with initial doubled lowercase “ff” instead of the more usual capital “F”?
Typical example in a short story by P. G. Wodehouse:
ffor ffucks sake, I have no ffucking idea.
fflipping 'eck Sir ppercy
I asked about this quite a while back, in relation to the Roger Moore movie ffolkes. IIRC, the response I got was that it was some Welsh thing, with the “ff” representing some letter or sound the rest of us don’t have.
It must have confused a lot of people, becvause I notice now that the movie is marketed as North Sea Hijack:
I looked it up a few years ago, and the claim was that once upon a time, you could write two small f’s to be a capital F: you could write Forde as fforde. It has since become something almost exclusively used by the upper classes, and is often seen as a snobbish affectation. So you see people named ffinch-ffarrowmere and so on; I don’t know why it’s usually hyphenated with some other name as well, but it sure seems to happen a lot.
Welsh does have a double-f to represent the hard f sound. Welsh single-f sounds like English v. But I think dangermom is right, and the double consonants at the start of some surnames date back to the time when some letters were written as double letters rather than capitals at the start of names. There’s an example in the second image on this page.
You know it’s really hard to google “ff”? But I got this tidbit off of a forum somewhere, so take it for what it’s worth:
The ‘old’ way of printing/writing included the rule that where an ‘s’ precedes a vowel, it is made to look like the ‘f’ of today - The letter ‘f’ was represented by ff (hence the old English surnames Ford and Forde, sometimes spelled Fford and Fforde (although strictly speaking, the capital shouldn’t be there… the names should be in the lower case fford and fforde).
Huh. Yeah, the archaic “double-lowercase letter at the start of a proper name” convention, surviving in the surname spelling used by ancient and/or snobby families, does make sense as an explanation.
And maybe the Welsh use of “ff” as a special consonant has something to do with why this convention survived particularly for names starting with “F”? I’ve never seen the “initial-double-lowercase” with any other letter, as in (hypothetical) “bbrett-bbrazelton” or “pplantaganet-ppym”, for example.
Thanks, ffolks!
The Welsh “ff” is pronounced as the double “f” in the English “off”.
The Welsh “f” is pronounced as the single “f” in the English “of”.
Just to insert a semi-appropriate tidbit: the double-l in Welsh is the voiceless lateral. Make an l-sound. Now make it again without using your vocal cords. Llewellyn.
The double-lowercase [ff] at the start of certain names has nothing to do with the Welsh letter Ff. For one thing, the Welsh capitalize the first [f] when it occurs in names, e.g. Ffagan. As stated above, the double-lowercase represents an older way of writing a single capital F.
From Wikipedia, “Capitalization”: “A few English names may be written with two lowercase f’s: ffrench, ffoulkes, etc. This ff fossilizes an older misreading of a blackletter uppercase F.”
I tried this and I end up with something that sounds like hhlewellyn.
That’s about right. But of course it should be more like “hhlewelhhun”. Less of the H though, it’s more of a hiss.
Now try Llanelli. Or Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
When I tried to pronounce this, I swallowed my tongue.
Did I do it right?
If you’re still alive to tell the tale, you probably did it wrong. Even Welsh speakers abbreviate that one (it’s the artificially extended version of the name of a village on the Welsh island of Anglesey).
You know it’s not all that unusual for a language to have sounds which are difficult to pronounce for non native speakers - we don’t even need to go as far as the “clicks” in Xhosa, our English “th” is a great example (even or some native Anglophones!) especially when placed at the end of a word “fifth” “eighth” etc.
There are other “extra” letters in Welsh (ch dd ff ng …) but “ll” gets a lot of attention because it’s so prevalent in place names - it usually denotes a church - Church of Elli, Church of Mair(Mary) etc.
Is it that poor little Welsh isn’t in the Romance club, nor even the Germanic one and so an easy target for mockery ? Would there be a similar tone in a discussion of Thai ? There’s been a theory about for a while that the Welsh are the only people it’s still ok to make derogatory remarks about … gingerly steps off soapbox
Not quite. You can tell that sort of s from a lower-case f as the bar extends only to the left of the vertical stroke.