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The grapheme Ř, ř (R with caron, example of Czech pronunciation: "řeka") is a letter used in the alphabets of the Czech and Upper Sorbian languages. It was also used in proposed orthographies for the Silesian language. It has been used in academic transcriptions for rhotic sounds.

The Unicode glyphs are U+0158 Ř LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R WITH CARON and U+0159 ř LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH CARON. Either can also be represented using the combining character U+030C  ̌  COMBINING CARON.

Usage

Czech

Ř is the 28th letter of the Czech alphabet. In the Czech language ř is used to denote /r̝/, a raised alveolar non-sonorant trill. Its manner of articulation is similar to other alveolar trills but the tongue is raised; it is partially fricative. It is usually voiced, , but it also has a voiceless allophone occurring in the vicinity of voiceless consonants or at the end of a word. Of the official national languages, only Czech has it.

In the oldest medieval texts, the sound of ř was simply spelled as r, then it was written using a variety of letter combinations, such as rs, rſ, rſſ, rz, and rzſ (compare oltars to modern oltář). According to Jan Gebauer (1894), the earliest known distinct appearance is in the place names Lukohorſany [cs] and Orſechow in a charter or deed from 1237. In the early 15th century work De orthographia bohemica, attributed to Jan Hus, the letter ṙ is introduced. The dot diacritic above the letter gradually had various forms, which eventually became the modern ř.

Upper Sorbian

Ř is a letter in the Upper Sorbian alphabet. In the Upper Sorbian language it denotes the voiceless postalveolar fricative . The letter only occurs after p, t, and k; it originates from older r that had been devoiced by those sounds by the early 9th century, and became a sibilant in the following centuries. The letter does not appear in the orthography of Lower Sorbian.

Silesian

The letter is present in a proposed alphabet for Silesian, the Silesian Phonetic Alphabet [szl], created in 2006. The alphabet was created with the goal of limiting the use of digraphs as much as possible, by replacing them with single characters. Ř had also been proposed in an orthography presented in 2001 by Piotr Kalinowski and Józef Kulisz, being used instead of the Polish digraph ⟨rz⟩ /ʐ/; this was done with the intention of emphasizing the separateness of Silesian from Polish. The writing system was only used in a few short internet entries of both codifiers. The letter was also used in a project by the linguist Jolanta Tambor [pl], presented in 2008, which was meant to reflect the phonetic diversity of the entire Silesian-speaking region by assigning letters to sounds heard only in some areas; ř represented the fricative trill of Cieszyn Silesian, like in Czech. The system did not attract much interest and is known only from the text of her paper.

Romani

It is used by academics and activists to represent the Romani language's second rhotic retained in some dialects (which is also commonly spelled as ⟨rr⟩), variously pronounced as a long trill , a uvular trill , or a retroflex tap or approximant .

Kurdish

In some Latin-based scripts of Kurdish, it represents the voiced alveolar trill , as opposed to the alveolar tap represented by ⟨r⟩.

Americanist notation

In Americanist phonetic notation, ř has been used to represent a flap. This usage might come from William A. Smalley in Manual of Articulatory Phonetics (1963).

Berber

The letter is used in scholarly transcriptions of Riffian Berber. It represents a sound that comes from historical *l; in most Riffian dialects it is distinguished from r by its lack of influence on nearby vowels, however in some dialects this contrast is strengthened either by ř being trilled and r being a tap, or by ř being palatalized and r not being palatalized. Ř is a rhotic approximant or fricative in some dialects.

Hausa

In Paul Newman's transcription of Hausa (seen in A History of the Hausa Language), it is used to represent the trill, as opposed to the flap represented by r. The contrast between the two is marginal in the modern language, but the distinction is important for tracing the phonological history of Hausa.

IPA

Lowercase ř is an obsolete symbol of the International Phonetic Alphabet, used as of 1912 and 1926. It represented the apicoalveolar fricative trill (as in Czech). The symbol was replaced by ɼ, a long-legged r, which was rarely used for a few decades before being retired in 1989. The sound is now represented by .

Umbrian

In transliterations of the native alphabet of the extinct Umbrian language, ř is used to designate a sound of unknown quality, generally deriving from earlier intervocalic *d (and also from intervocalic *l that preceded a front vowel). The same sound was represented in the Latin alphabet by the sequence ⟨rs⟩.

Encodings

References

1. "Sound Patterns of Czech". Institute of Phonetics - Charles University. Retrieved 21 August 2023.
2. ^ "Z historie českého pravopisu" [The history of Czech spelling]. Internetová jazyková příručka (in Czech). Prague: Institute of the Czech Language. 2008–2023. Retrieved 21 August 2023.
3. "Ano / ne, Téma, 2015". Čilichili (in Czech). Retrieved 11 September 2018.
4. Gebauer, Jan (1894). Historická mluvnice jazyka českého [Historical grammar of the Czech language] (in Czech). Vol. 1 - Hláskosloví. p. 329.
5. ^ Comrie, Bernard; Corbett, Greville G. (1993). The Slavonic languages. London New-York (N.Y.): Routledge. pp. 603, 605–606. ISBN 0-415-04755-2.
6. Schaarschmidt, Gunter (1998). A Historical Phonology of the Upper and Lower Sorbian Languages. Universitätsverlag Winter. pp. 41–43. ISBN 978-3-8253-0417-1.
7. "Etnolekt śląski - 3. Ortografia półfonetyczna" [Silesian ethnolect - 3. Semi-phonetic orthography] (PDF). Miejska Biblioteka Publiczna w Rudzie Śląskiej (in Polish). Retrieved 22 August 2023.
8. Jaroszewicz, Henryk (2022). "Ortografie współczesnego piśmiennictwa śląskojęzycznego" [Orthographies of contemporary Silesian-language literature]. Slavia Occidentalis (in Polish) (78/1–79/1): 67–83. doi:10.14746/so.2021/2022.78-79.6. Retrieved 22 August 2023.
9. Leggio, D. Viktor; Matras, Yaron (2017). "Orthography Development on the Internet: Romani on YouTube". Creating Orthographies for Endangered Languages: 271. doi:10.1017/9781316562949.013. ISBN 9781316562949. Retrieved 22 August 2023.
10. Matras, Yaron (2009). "Romani". In Brown, Edward Keith; Ogilvie, Sarah (eds.). Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world (PDF). Amsterdam Oxford: Elsevier. p. 899. ISBN 978-0-08-087774-7. Retrieved 23 August 2023.
11. Azin, Zahra; Ahmadi, Sina (2021). Creating an Electronic Lexicon for the Under-resourced Southern Varieties of Kurdish Language (PDF). Proceedings of the eLex 2021 conference. Brno: Lexical Computing CZ, s.r.o. p. 483.
12. Anselme, Rémi; Pellegrino, François; Dediu, Dan (21 March 2023). "What's in the r? A review of the usage of the r symbol in the Illustrations of the IPA". Journal of the International Phonetic Association: 1–30. doi:10.1017/S0025100322000238. ISSN 0025-1003. Retrieved 22 August 2023.
13. Mourigh, Khalid; Kossmann, Maarten (2019). An introduction to Tarifiyt Berber (Nador, Morocco). Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. pp. 21–23, 28. ISBN 978-3868353075.
14. Kossmann, Maarten (2013). The Arabic influence on Northern Berber. Leiden Boston: Brill. p. 181. ISBN 978-90-04-25309-4.
15. Pawlak, Nina (18 May 2023). "Paul Newman, A History of the Hausa Language. Reconstruction and Pathways to the Present". Journal of African Languages and Literatures (4): 126–135. doi:10.6093/jalalit.v4i4.10037. Retrieved 22 August 2023.
16. Whitley, M. Stanley (2003). "Rhotic representation: problems and proposals". Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 33 (1): 83. ISSN 0025-1003. JSTOR 44526903. Retrieved 14 September 2023.
17. Onishi, Teigo (26 November 2021). "Umbrian ⟨rs⟩ and ⟨rf⟩: A synchronic and diachronic puzzle". Indo-European Linguistics. 9 (1): 203–233. doi:10.1163/22125892-bja10013. ISSN 2212-5884. Retrieved 21 August 2023.

• Letters with caron
• Latin letters with diacritics
• Czech language