1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/R
R THE twentieth letter in the
Phoenician alphabet, the
nineteenth in the numerical Greek, the seventeenth in the
ordinary Greek and the Latin and (owing to the addition
of J) the eighteenth in the English. Its earliest form in
the Phoenician alphabet when written from right to left was
, thus resembling the symbol for D with one side of the
triangle prolonged. In Aramaic and other Semitic scripts
which were modified by opening the heads of the letters, the
symbol in time became very much changed. Greek, however,
maintained the original form with slight variations from place
to place. Not infrequently in the Greek alphabets of Asia
Minor and occasionally also in the West, R was written as 
,
thus introducing a confusion with D (q.v.). Elsewhere a short
tail was added, as occasionally in the island of Melos, in Attica
and in western Greece, but nowhere does this seem to have
been universal. The earliest Latin forms are exactly like
the Greek. Thus in the very early inscriptions found in the
Forum in 1899 R appears as 
(from right to left), 
and
(from left to right). Later the forms 
and 
come in;
sometimes the back is not quite connected in the middle to
the upright, when the form 
is produced. The name of the
Semitic symbol is Rēsh; why it was called by the Greeks Rhō
(ῥῶ) is not clear. The h which accompanies r in the transliteration
of Greek ρ, indicates that it was breathed, not voiced,
in pronunciation. No consonant varies more in pronunciation
than r. According to Brockelmann, the original Semitic r
was probably a trilled r, i.e. an r produced by allowing the tip
of the tongue to vibrate behind the teeth while the upper
surface of the tongue is pressed against the sockets of the teeth.
The ordinary English r is also produced against the sockets of
the teeth, but without trilling; another r, also untrilled, which
is found in various parts of the south of England, is produced
by turning up the tip of the tongue behind the sockets of the
teeth till the tongue acquires something of a spoon shape.
This, which is also common in the languages of modern India,
is called the cerebral or cacuminal r, the former term, which
has no meaning in this connexion, being only a bad translation
of a Sanscrit term. The common German r is produced by
vibrations of the uvula at the end of the soft palate, and hence
is called the uvular r. There are also many other varieties
of this sound. In many languages r is able to form syllables
by itself, in the same way that l, m, n may do, as in the English
brittle (britl), written (rltn). In Europe r with this value is
most conspicuous in Slavonic languages like Bohemian (Czech)
and Croatian; in English r in this function is replaced by a
genuine vowel in words like mother (moðꝺ). This syllabic r is
first recorded for Sanscrit, where it is common, but is replaced
in the languages descended from Sanscrit by r and a vowel or
by a vowel only, according to the position in which it occurs.
Most philologists are of opinion that syllabic r existed also in the
mother-tongue of the Indo-European languages. (P. Gi.)