Cathedral, "Кафедральный", why is ф in there?

Question

After reading this article I got curious how ф is in place of "th" in English for the word Cathedral (Кафедральный)? Sounds almost like a coffee-place. (I know it is not Café or Kafee in russian but кофе so it would be кофедрала something. Ok, enough of the silliness.)

How is it that the word Кафедральный has this ф instead of some other Cyrillic letters?

https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/219/are-there-words-that-can-be-spelled-with-both-%d1%82-and-%d1%84 — Quassnoi, Aug 19 '18 at 09:32
Russian is actually the only Slavic language I can think of which has кофе for coffee and not a variation of кава — Quassnoi, Aug 19 '18 at 09:38
How does it sound like a coffee place? Does cathedral sound like a coffee place to you too? — Abakan, Aug 19 '18 at 13:04
@Abakan russian word кофе sounds a bit similar to кафе which is first part of the russian word cathedral. — mathreadler, Aug 19 '18 at 13:08
Okay okay, sorry for being rude or whatever I accidentally did. — mathreadler, Aug 19 '18 at 13:11
nothing to apologize for, maybe for a foreigner there's similarity, but they differ in the last phoneme, which is E (narrow) in кафе-дральный and Э (wide) in кафe... where the кафе- part is pronounced virtually identically to кафе-дральный is in the word кафе-терий (cafeteria) — Баян Купи-ка, Aug 19 '18 at 13:22
@Abakan Кофе-дральный собор. Мне, пожалуйста, двойной эспрессо за здравие. А мне три заупокойных латте на вынос. — Headcrab, Aug 21 '18 at 00:11
Sorry if my sense of humor was misplaced, I am not very religious person most days. — mathreadler, Aug 21 '18 at 09:09
no, it wasn't, outside of joking about a rope in the home of a suicider, it cannot be — Баян Купи-ка, Aug 23 '18 at 06:55
No I usually don't joke about such things, @БаянКупи-ка — mathreadler, Aug 23 '18 at 08:07

Баян Купи-ка · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-23T06:53:18.463

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The word кафедра, which is the base for кафедральный, in Russian is a loan word from Greek, καθέδρα.

Pre-reform Russian alphabet contained the Greek letter θ (фита) and by the old orthograpical rules the word кафедральный would be spelled as каθедральный

As a result of the reform of 1918, by which it was abolished, among other things, it was replaced with the letter Ф.

But i believe θ was still pronounced like Ф, which provided justification for such a replacement.

Nowadays however, in transliteration of the English TH (which is similar to the Greek θ) instead of Ф the Russian letter T would rather be used or C, depending on the position in a word.

edited Aug 23 '18 at 06:53

answered Aug 19 '18 at 09:10

Баян Купи-ка

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Ah so you actually had something like a theta letter before 1918? Wow this is really interesting. – mathreadler Aug 19 '18 at 09:12
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@mathreadler indeed, the old alphabet had all kinds of peculiar characters for special cases, like transliteration of Greek, or representing obsolete phonemes preserved only in writing – Баян Купи-ка Aug 19 '18 at 09:19

Cathedral, "Кафедральный", why is ф in there?

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