R

R is the eighteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ar (; pronounced or ).^[1]

History

Egyptian hieroglyph tp	Proto-Semitic R	Phoenician R	Etruscan R	Greek Rho	Later Etruscan R
<hiero>D1</hiero>

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 Rê? (also the name of the letter). It developed into Greek ? (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.

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.

Various phonetic realizations of R

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, 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.

Alveolar trill	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	Listen	English (most varieties), Dutch in some Dutch dialects (in specific positions of words), Faroese
Alveolar flap / Alveolar tap	Listen	Greek, Hindi '?', Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish and Albanian 'r', Turkish, Italian
Alveolar lateral flap	Listen	Japanese
Voiced retroflex fricative	Listen	Mandarin as an allophone
Retroflex approximant	Listen	some varieties of American English, Mandarin as an allophone
Retroflex flap	Listen	Hindi '??', sometimes Scottish English
Uvular trill	Listen	German stage standard, French; Dutch in Belgium and some Dutch dialects, Swedish in Southern Sweden
Voiced uvular fricative	Listen	German, Danish, French in and around Paris, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese

Codes for computing

The ASCII code for capital R is 82 and for lowercase r is 114; or in binary 01010010 and 01110010, correspondingly.

Dog's Letter

The letter R is sometimes referred to as the dog's 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".

References

R

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