Comment on It's amazing so many people are able to use English as a second language.
yetAnotherUser@feddit.de 5 months agoUh I had to quickly look at Wikipedia but apparently the reason it’s transcribed with Ph is:
At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi ‘Φ’ then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /ph/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.)
And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which the Greeks did not have.
So Greeks pronounced Phi differently from F and somehow someone decided that it should be transcribed as Ph because it sounded different from F. Maybe the Phi symbol just looked like a P.