concept
Fita (Ѳ)
fita
also: фита, Ѳ
An archaic letter of the pre-1918 Russian alphabet, redundant with ф (f); Chekhov calls it a "foolish letter" and wishes it abolished along with yat, izhitsa, and decimal i.
Reading notes
- From an Old Schoolmaster's Notebook §3 the fita, the izhitsa, and the vocative case
Fita (Ѳ) and izhitsa (Ѵ) were archaic letters of the pre-1918 Russian alphabet, already felt as obsolete clutter by the 1890s (both were formally abolished in the 1918 orthographic reform); the vocative case (звательный падеж) was likewise a moribund grammatical form, surviving mainly in a handful of fossilized address-forms ("Боже", "отче") rather than as a living case. The old pedagogue's "logic" -- that a shrinking alphabet and grammar justify a shrinking salary -- is the joke: he treats the slow attrition of archaic forms as literally less work for a teacher of Russian.