R Shape & R Objects-Images Represented in the World

Abstract

This article describes capital letter R as a Shape or image and forms part of an ongoing research project that treats the letters and symbols of phonetic alphabets as shorthand or abbreviated images of real objects; it aims eventually at an R Album of R Shape positions and representative objects. It rests on the author's earlier observation that written language shapes are not arbitrary but are consistently built from two atomic parts, the Strait and the Kurve, which are also found in the shapes of objects; capital R is described as a Strait combined with a more complex Kurve. The article discusses two issues raised by previous studies: the apparent arbitrariness of R-spelt words, set against the observation that some objects resemble their letter-shapes, giving typical and atypical letter-Shapes; and redundancy, since forms such as R, Я, ʁ and ᴚ are treated as different symbols in linguistics but as a single Shape in different positions in this approach. It also reviews the development of R across writing systems. The author concludes that R objects exist in the world, more so among artificially constructed objects, that R as a Shape is not arbitrarily represented in the world, that differences in positioning are context based, and that a lexicon of R-spelt words could be useful to the project.

Abstract prepared by the editorial office from the full text of the article; the authors did not supply one.