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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?
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.
