Not capitalized. Why?
ffuck if I know.
I’m guessing at the context here, but I’m assuming on the internet or in messaging. There is a huge movement in online communication that capitalization is bad. Autocapitalization is standard, but even that is often disabled for most people.
I was on an mmorpg and said, why is capitalization so bad? the standard lettering in comics is all capitals, and don’t even think of trying to tell me nobody here ever read a comic before.
In Welsh, “ff” was at one time considered a separate letter from “f,” and in some scripts, capital “ff” looked pretty much like lower-case “ff” only slightly larger or with some other minor difference.
In the early days of typesetting, some printers carried this over, and rendered capital and lower-case “ff” as identical or very close in appearance and some Welsh proper names like “ffolkes” or “ffloyd” were sometimes rendered this way in English texts as well.
No, these are very old proper names.
The short answer is because the English language has weird names, and this particular digraph is not capitalized. **Ascenray **has the right idea, but I’m not sure if all of these can be linked to a Welsh origin. See: ff.
I think that the examples you are likely to see in English are going to be from Welsh.
In some black-letter scripts, “F” looks almost exactly like “ff,” but I doubt very much that this would be the origin of word-initial “ff” you’re likely to see used in modern English
I mean specifically “ffrench,” which seems to be of Irish or Norman-Irish origin, although filtered through English.
I see some places claiming that, but I don’t know if there is any evidence.
Ah!
The Wikipedia article on typographic ligatures has an interesting clue: Lowercase “f” extends particularly far to the right, so it links easier with letters to the right of it. Uppercase “F” is different. So “Ff” won’t link nicely like “ff” does. If “ff” is treated as a unit (as in Welsh) you’d want to make sure that the ligature existed. So you’d want to avoid “Ff” and use “ff” instead. But creating a special “capital” “ff” for the rare cases you need it is a waste of lead, so names that need the leading ligature were typeset lowercase. Basically the need for a ligature trumped the capitalization rules.
Thank you!
Ff and F are still separate letters in Welsh. The English convention has nothing to do with the Welsh language, though; it is because “ff” is a reasonable approximation of F in some scripts: example.
The story I’ve heard is that an F in certain writing styles (blackletter, fraktur, gothic, I can’t keep 'em straight any more) looks like ff. So a Mr Finch becomes a Mr ffinch. My cite for this would be the QI episode, but I don’t know which one it was.
There’s a nice explanation (true or not I don’t know) by George Sanders’ character (whose name in the film is ffolliott) in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940, Joel McCrea and Laraine Day).
“One of my ancestors had his head chopped off by Henry VIII and his wife dropped the capital letter to commemorate the occasion.”
Not very likely, I suppose, but somewhat artistic under the circumstances (a car chase).
Fraktur and “Old English” are subsets of Black Letter.
“Gothic” is colloquial for black letter. In typography, “Gothic” means sans serif, which is clearly different.
That finally explains the title of the Roger Moore film I always liked.