R is the eighteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ar (IPA: /ɑr/; pronounced [ɑː] or [ɑɹ]).[1]
[edit] History
The original Semitic letter was probably inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for "head", pronounced t-p in Egyptian, but it was used for /r/ by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was Rêš (also the name of the letter). It developed into Greek Ρ ῥῶ (Rhô) and Latin R. It is likely that some Etruscan and Western Greek forms of the letter added the extra stroke to distinguish it from a later form of the letter P.
[edit] Minuscule
The minuscule (lower-case) form of r developed through several variations on the capital form. In handwriting it was common not to close the bottom of the loop but continue into the leg, saving an extra pen stroke. The loop-leg stroke shortened into the simple arc used today.
Another minuscule, r rotunda, kept the loop-leg stroke but dropped the vertical stroke. It fell out of use around the 18th century.
[edit] Various phonetic realizations of R
See rhotic consonant, r-colored vowel, and guttural R for discussion of the family of 'r' sounds.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [r] represents the alveolar trill sound. Other languages may use the letter r in their alphabets (or Latin transliterations schemes) to represent rhotic consonants different from the alveolar trill. In Haitian Creole, it is represents a sound so weak that it is often written interchangeably with w, eg. Kweyol for Kreyol. This sound can also change in a language perceptibly over time; the alveolar trill of British English is more characteristic of 19th / early 20th century speech and is associated with older speakers, while younger Britons have been known for a much weaker 'r' since at least the 1980s[citation needed].
| Alveolar trill [r] |
Listen |
Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, some dialects of British English or in emphatic speech, Finnish, German in some dialects, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese in emphatic male speech, Lithuanian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Catalan, Romanian, Russian, Scots, Spanish and Albanian 'rr', Swedish, Welsh, in standard Dutch |
| Alveolar approximant [ɹ] |
Listen |
English (most varieties), Dutch in some Dutch dialects (in specific positions of words), Faroese |
| Alveolar flap / Alveolar tap [ɾ] |
Listen |
Greek, Hindi 'र', Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish and Albanian 'r', Turkish, Italian |
| Alveolar lateral flap [ɺ] |
Listen |
Japanese |
| Voiced retroflex fricative [ʐ] |
Listen |
Mandarin as an allophone, Spanish used as an allophone of [r] in some South American accents. |
| Retroflex approximant [ɻ] |
Listen |
some varieties of American English, Mandarin as an allophone |
| Retroflex flap [ɽ] |
Listen |
Hindi 'ड़', sometimes Scottish English |
| Uvular trill [ʀ] |
Listen |
German stage standard, French; Dutch in Belgium and some Dutch dialects, Swedish in Southern Sweden |
| Voiced uvular fricative [ʁ] |
Listen |
German, Danish, French in and around Paris, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese |
[edit] Codes for computing
Alternative representations of R
In Unicode the capital R is codepoint U+0052 and the lower case r is U+0072.
The ASCII code for capital R is 82 and for lowercase r is 114; or in binary 01010010 and 01110010, correspondingly.
The EBCDIC code for capital R is 217 and for lowercase r is 153.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "R" and "r" for upper and lower case respectively.
[edit] Dog's Letter
The letter R is sometimes referred to as the littera canina (canine letter). This phrase has Latin origins: the Latin R was trilled so it sounds like a snarling dog. A good example of a trilling R is the Spanish word for dog: perro. [2] In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare makes reference to R being the dog's letter in Act 2 Scene 4, when Juliet's nurse calls the letter R "The dog's name".
[edit] See also
[edit] References
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