Pe (Persian letter)
Letter used to represent the [p] sound in Persian and Kurdish alphabet
Pe (پ) is a letter in the Persian alphabet and the Kurdish alphabet used to represent the voiceless bilabial plosive [p]. It is based on Bā' (ب) with two additional diacritic dots. It is one of the five letters that were created specifically for the Persian alphabet to symbolize sounds found in Persian but not in Arabic, others being Že (ژ), Če (چ), and Gaf (گ), in addition the obsolete Ve (ڤ). In name and shape, it is a variant of Bā' (ب).
It is used in Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Balochi, and other Iranian languages, Uyghur, Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Shina, and Turkic languages (before the Latin and Cyrillic scripts were adopted). Its numerical value is 2000 (see Abjad numerals).
It is one of additional common foreign letters that are sometimes used in some Arabic dialects to represent foreign sounds, it represents /p/ in loanwords and it can be substituted by Bā' (ب) /b/ such as in protein which is written as بروتين /broːtiːn/ or پروتين /proːtiːn/. In Egypt, the letter is called "Bā' with three dots" (به بتلات نقط, Bā' be-talat noʾaṭ, [be beˈtælæt ˈnoʔɑtˤ]).
In Israel, the letter is sometimes used to transliterate names containing /p/ into Arabic, when that sound originates in non-Semitic languages. When the /p/ sound comes from a Hebrew word, there is normally an Arabic translation instead. When representing this sound in transliteration of Persian into Hebrew, it is written as ב׳.
| Position in word: | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glyph form: (Help) |
پ | ـپ | ـپـ | پـ |
01Character encodings
| Preview | پ | |
|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | PERSIAN LETTER PEH | |
| Encodings | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 1662 | U+067E |
| UTF-8 | 217 190 | D9 BE |
| Numeric character reference | پ | پ |
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Pe (Persian letter)”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Rue Champollion in Alexandria.JPG by Meursault2004, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Use of Perso-Arabic letter Pe to transliterate English P into Arabic on an Israeli road sign.jpg by Moxfyre, CC BY-SA 4.0
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