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| Basic Latin alphabet | |||||
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | ||
| Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | ||
| Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn |
| Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | |
| Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz |
R is the eighteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced ) is spelled ar, plural ars;[1] its name in Hiberno-English is or .
Contents |
History
| Egyptian hieroglyph tp |
Proto-Semitic R | Phoenician resh |
Etruscan R | Greek Rho |
Later Etruscan R | ||
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The original Semitic letter was probably inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for "head", pronounced t-p in Egyptian, but it was used for 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.
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 (ꝛ), kept the loop-leg stroke but dropped the vertical stroke. It fell out of use around the 18th century.
Usage
The letter R represents a rhotic consonant in many languages, as shown in the table below. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses several variations of the letter to represent the different rhotic consonsants; represents the alveolar trill.
| Alveolar trill | Listen | Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, some dialects of British English or in emphatic speech, Finnish, German in some dialects, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Czech, Lithuanian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Catalan, Portuguese (traditional European form), Romanian, Russian, Scots, Spanish and Albanian 'rr', Swedish, Welsh, in standard Dutch, Galician |
| Alveolar approximant | Listen | English (most varieties), Dutch in some Dutch dialects (in specific positions of words), Faroese |
| Alveolar flap / Alveolar tap | Listen | Greek, Hindi 'र', Korean 'ㄹ' (also realised as [l] or [ɭ]), Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish and Albanian 'r', Turkish, Italian, Quechua, Galician, Leonese |
| Alveolar lateral flap | Listen | Japanese |
| Voiced retroflex fricative | Listen | Mandarin as an allophone, Spanish used as an allophone of [r] in some South American accents. |
| Retroflex approximant | Listen | some varieties of American English, Mandarin as an allophone |
| Retroflex flap | Listen | Hindi 'ड़', sometimes Scottish English |
| Uvular trill | Listen | Arabic, German stage standard; some Dutch dialects (mainly in Belgium), Swedish in Southern Sweden, Norwegian in western and southern parts |
| Voiced uvular fricative | Listen | German, Danish, French, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese |
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 represents a sound so weak that it is often written interchangeably with w, eg. Kweyol for Kreyol.
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 growling dog. A good example of a trilling R is the Spanish word for dog, perro. [2] In William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, such a reference is made by Juliet's nurse in Act 2, scene 4, when she calls the letter R "the dog's name." The reference is also found in Ben Jonson's English Grammar.[3]
Codes for computing
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.
See also
References
- ^ "R" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); "ar," op. cit.
- ^ A Word A Day: Dog's letter
- ^ Shakespeare, William; Horace Howard Furness, Frederick Williams (1913). Romeo and Juliet. Lippincott. p. 189. http://books.google.com/books?id=Wj0OAAAAIAAJ&client=firefox-a.
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This page was last modified on 3 March 2010 at 03:39.
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