r rotunda

English

The Unicode letter pair latin capital/small letter r rotunda rendered by different fonts.

Etymology

From or representing Latin r rotunda (literally “round ‘r’”). The adjective rotunda is the feminine form of rotundus, inflected to agree with littera (“letter”), elliptically omitted (compare e caudata). The phrase is little attested in Latin, and might have been formed in English, or been borrowed from another language which formed it from those Latin roots.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˌɑː.ɹəʊˈtʌn.də/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˌɑɹ.ɹoʊˈtʌn.də/

Noun

r rotunda (plural rs rotunda or rs rotundae)

1. (typography) A curved form of the letter r, found in some medieval and fraktur scripts: ⟨ ꝛ ⟩.

   Coordinate term: straight r

   • 1989, Arend Quak, Florus (Floor) Rhee, Palaeogermanica et onomastica., Rodopi (→ISBN), page 3:

     […] completely informed about the decisions made and the reasons to make them, e.g. r rotunda does not figure in the transcription as the use of straight r and r rotunda is governed by the preceding character and thus completely predictable.

   • 2000, Anna A. Grotans, Heinrich Beck, Anton Schwob, De consolatione philogiae: studies in honor of Evelyn S. Firchow, volume 2, page 624:

     And certain geminated consonants are represented by capitals : ɢ, ɴ, ʀ, ꜱ. Does a form like haʀ mean a long r, or is it a scribal habit on the level of the usage of r rotunda, not straight r, after round letters? The occurrence of forms with -rr […]

   • 2017, Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen, editor, A Grammar of Möðruvallabók, BRILL, →ISBN, page 11:

     The distinction between r rotunda and straight r has not been kept in the transcription, as the usage of r rotunda is predictable from the preceding character: r rotunda is used after round letters.

Translations

curved form of the letter r

• Czech: okrouhlé r
• German: rundes r n

Further reading

• r rotunda on Wikipedia.Wikipedia