is derived from the Greek pi and the Semetic pe.
In Phoenician, pe is believed to have meant the word mouth. Though the sound of P
(technically a lip unvoiced stop) has remained mostly unchanged, its form of P has gone
through a lot of changes: in early Greek it resembled
a cursive gamma, then slowly became something of an inverted U before finally
becoming the well-recognized pi. The western Greek alphabet
changed pi into a backwards loop shape. Many English words
beginning with ph are decended from the Greek letter phi.
Like Greek, the runic alphabet had two signs for P.
