Af (Fa) ፈ

Af writes a plain f and continues the Semitic p. Its cognates are the Hebrew peh, the Syriac pe and the Arabic fa, and the set records a sound change that Ge'ez and Arabic made and Hebrew did not: in both southern branches the inherited p became f, while Hebrew kept the stop and allows it to soften to f only in certain positions.

Everything odd about the end of the Ge'ez order follows from that change. A language with no p has no need of a letter for one, so the twenty-two inherited signs contained none. When Greek names and Greek loanwords arrived with the scriptures, the language met a sound it had lost and a body of proper names it could not spell. The two p letters at the end of the order, payt and psa, are the answer to that problem, and they stand at the end because they were added to a sequence already fixed.

So this letter is where a reader should start when asking why the fidel has twenty-six letters rather than twenty-two. Two of the four additions, harm and sappa, are inheritances from a South Arabian script richer than the Northwest Semitic one. The other two are repairs, made after the fact, for a gap this sound change opened.

The change also explains why English speakers meet Ethiopian names in forms that look unrelated to their Greek or Hebrew originals. A name arriving with a p is not transliterated with one, and the f standing in its place is not an approximation made by a foreign ear. It is the regular reflex of a sound change internal to the language.

Fasika, the Ethiopian name for Easter, begins with this letter, and the spelling is a small piece of evidence. The word comes from the Greek pascha, which comes in turn from the Aramaic and Hebrew term for the Passover. A Greek p arrived in a language that had no p, and it was written with the letter for f, which was the nearest sound available.

That is worth setting beside Pawlos and Petros, where the same language solved the same problem the other way and added a letter. Both strategies are visible in the lexicon, which suggests the borrowings did not all arrive at once or through the same hands. A word taken in early enough, and used often enough to settle, kept the substitution. A proper name that mattered enough to spell exactly got the new sign.

The feast itself is the centre of the Ethiopian year. It follows the fifty-five days of Abiy Tsom and a vigil that runs through the night, and the calculation of its date belongs to the bahre hasab, the computus taught in the church schools. The letter that opens its name is the twenty-fifth of the fidel, and the reason it opens the name rather than a p is a sound change that happened long before there was a Christian in Ethiopia to say it.