Speaking Of Words: The Letter R

By Michael Ferber, InDepth NH

Is it possible to write an interesting column about the letter R? Maybe not, but I’m going to try.

As a written sign it is not all that interesting. In the Greek alphabet it looked like this: P. In the Phoenician alphabet, which the Greeks adapted, it looked like a backward P, but the Phoenicians, like their close kin the Hebrews, wrote from right to left. So did the Greeks at first, then they wrote in both directions, and then they settled on left to right, at which point the letter was reversed.

In Latin, which got its alphabet from the Etruscans, who seemed to have gotten theirs from western Greeks (the Greek alphabet varied somewhat from place to place), the P looked a lot like their letter for the sound [p], so the Romans added a descending diagonal stroke (which some Greeks had added already) and gave us R.

How did the Greeks and Romans pronounce the sound? Not, you may be sure, like the downright weird standard English pronunciation today, which emerged in southern England and has become the norm in the United States. In fact there are two pronunciations, and they are both barely consonants at all. Initial R, as in rock or roll, entails curling the lips a little while raising the tongue higher than but not touching the hard palate or ridge (alveolus) above the teeth and pulling back a little. Got that? Final R, as in star or were, does not include lip-curling, just the tongue position, and in standard British and some dialects in New England the final R disappears altogether, though it lengthens the preceding vowel a little, hence “Pahk yuah cah neah Hahvahd Yahd.”

It’s a very difficult sound, and is very rare among the thousands of languages of the world. And it is one of no less than four “approximants” in English, usually spelled R, L, W, and Y. I used to torment my Japanese students by drilling them so they could distinguish really from leery, which sounded more or less the same to them and like no sounds in Japanese. With L, at least, the tongue lightly touches the alveolus, though it does not make a noise, as in D. R is the vaguest of these almost-consonants, and often the last to be mastered by children. My daughter, who learned to speak fairly quickly, took her time learning it. As we drove by the horse barns on our way to her day-care center, I would sometimes ask her, “What do horses eat?” And she would say, “Cawwots.” Elmer Fudd had trouble with it, too, as he chased that pesky wabbit. The English R is so odd that the symbol for it in the International Phonetic Alphabet is an upside-down small r.

Back to the Greeks and Romans. There is good evidence, though too complicated to show here, that they pronounced the R as a flap or roll of the tongue tip against the alveolar ridge. It would have been very like the R in Italian and Spanish today, or in Modern Greek, which all preserve the ancient sound.

Not in French, however. Something strange happened in French in the seventeenth century, when the standard alveolar R mutated into a uvular R, even into a uvular fricative, like a gurgle. The uvula is the little soft stalactite at the back of the mouth, which the back of the tongue can touch. Perhaps some fashionable fop in the Parisian aristocracy thought it was cool to move the R back into the throat, or perhaps a prince or princess had a speech impediment—in any case, the fad spread and is now the norm in most of France, not to mention Germany, Denmark, and elsewhere. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for it is an upside-down capital R.

It is worth noting that what used to be chair or chaire in French is now chaise. However that got started, it must have been before the shift of the R into the uvula, for the [z] sound in chaise is articulated right next to the alveolus, like the earlier French R. In fact there are many examples of shifts from [r] to [z] and from [z] to [r] in languages around the world. To take two examples from the Germanic family: many Icelandic and Old Norse nouns end in -r, such as dagr (“day”) and armr (“arm”), while the same words in Gothic, a more archaic language, end in -s, such as dags and arms; and it is possible that English is and was have the same root as are and were.

When I took French in high school, neither of my teachers, who were both Americans, even tried to pronounce the uvular R. We heard it when we listened to tapes in language lab, but we got no help with it in class. I got more help with the sound when I took German, but even after many decades of working on it, and a few trips to France and Germany, my R is at best respectable for an American. That’s another bit of evidence against the perverse American custom of delaying the teaching of foreign languages until high school, at the time when in most brains the first-language faculty has begun to shut down.

The Greek name for the letter R is rho, which has an H in it. It seems that, as the Greeks flapped or rolled their tongue to make the sound, they also breathed or puffed some air out with it. That is why English has several Greek words that begin rh-: rhapsody, rheostat, rhetoric, rheumatism, rhinoceros, rhizome, rhododendron, rhombus, rhyme, and rhythm.

So different are the three main ways to pronounce the R in the European languages that some linguists have questioned whether they really belong together and should share the same letter in the IPA, whether large or small or upside-down. If we didn’t know the history of the sounds we would have to agree, but they are all descendants of a single sound in the ancestor of Greek, Latin, and Gothic that we call Proto-Indo-European. We think the people who spoke it probably flapped their Rs on their alveoli while they were hitching their horses to their chariots. They soon conquered nearly all of Europe, not to mention India and Iran, and planted their Rs wherever they went. But from those seeds some strange flowers sprang up centuries later.

I am happy to hear from readers with questions of comments: mferber@unh.edu.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.