or even earlier. At the little town of Falerii (Civita Castellana), whose alphabet is undoubtedly of the same origin as the Latin,
takes the form
. Though uncertain, therefore, it seems not impossible that the original symbol of the Phoenician alphabet, which was a consonant like the English w, may have been differentiated in Greek into two symbols, one indicating the consonant value w and retaining the position of the Phoenician consonant Vau, the other having the vowel value u, which ultimately most dialects changed to a modified sound like French u or German ü. Be this as it may, the value of the symbol
in Greek was w, a bilabial voiced sound, not the labio-dental unvoiced sound which we call f. When the Romans adopted the Greek alphabet they took over the symbols with their Greek values. But Greek had no sound corresponding to the Latin f, for φ was pronounced p-h, like the final sound of lip in ordinary English or the initial sound of pig in Irish English. Consequently in the very old inscription on a gold fibula found at Praeneste and published in 1887 (see [Alphabet]) the Latin f is represented by
. Later, as Latin did not use