Pei

PEI or Pei may refer to:

Pei (surname)

Pei (Chinese: 裴; pinyin: Péi) is an East Asian surname originating in north China. In 2008, it was the 156th most common surname in mainland China, with at least 830,000 Chinese sharing this name.

There are also people with this surname based on the same Chinese letter in Vietnam (as Bùi) and Korea (as Bae; 배).

Notable people

Historical Figures

Modern Figures

References

Pe (letter)

Pe is the seventeenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Pē , Hebrew Pē פ, Aramaic Pē , Syriac Pē ܦ, and Arabic Fāʼ ف (in abjadi order).

The original sound value is a voiceless bilabial plosive: /p/; it retains this value in most Semitic languages except for Arabic, which having lost /p/ now uses it to render a voiceless labiodental fricative /f/.

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Pi (Π), Latin P, and Cyrillic П.

Origins

Pe is usually assumed to come from a pictogram of a mouth (in Hebrew pe; in Arabic, فاه fah).

Hebrew Pe

The Hebrew spelling is פֵּא. It is also romanized pey, especially when used in Yiddish.

Variations on written form/pronunciation

The letter Pe is one of the six letters which can receive a Dagesh Kal. The six are Bet, Gimel, Daleth, Kaph, Pe, and Tav.

There are two orthographic variants of this letter which indicate a different pronunciation:

Pe with the dagesh

When the Pe has a "dot" in its center, known as a dagesh, it represents a voiceless bilabial plosive, /p/. There are various rules in Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used.