Talk:r̃

RFV discussion

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Rfv-sense: Hausa section. Never seen nor heard of this. -- Prince Kassad 22:16, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Apparently this letter is not used in the standard orthography, but is used in some (many? most?) dictionaries and linguisticky works and such:

• Philip J. Jaggar's 2001 Hausa uses it, explaining :

  The symbol r̃ (with the tilde diacritic) differentiates the alveolar tap/roll from the retroflex native flap r [ɽ], a phonemic contrast which is not marked in Hausa orthography (§16).

• Paul Newman's 2007 A Hausa–English Dictionary uses it, explaining:

  Hausa has two partially contrastive R sounds: a retroflex flap and a roll/tap. These are not distinguished in the standard orthography nor in Hausa written in Arabic script (termed ajami). In this dictionary (as well as in the companion English–Hausa Dicitonary and The Hausa Language), the difference between the two R’s is overtly marked as a pronunciation guide. (The distinction is, however, ignored for the purposes of alphabetization.) The flap R, e.g., rānā “sun”, is transcribed with the ordinary r symbol. The roll/tap R, e.g., r̃ahā̀ “pleasant chatting”, is written as r̃ (i.e., r with a tilde).

• Nicholas Awde's 1996 Hausa-English/English-Hausa Practical Dictionary^[1] uses it, explaining:

  A tilde over an r indicates that it is rolled/trilled, not flapped: r̃, R̃.

• TeachYourselfHausa.com's "Hausa Alphabet" page distinguishes between "r" and "r tilde", and in an image showing the romanization of some ajami on a banknote, it does include the tilde. However, the site doesn't seem to very high-quality, honestly: it doesn't mention that the standard orthography drops the distinction, and aside from the alphabet page, none of the rest of the site seems to use any diacritics or special characters. Even the alphabet page doesn't mention vowel diacritics.

so, our definition isn't accurate — this isn't a distinct letter between r and s (like how Spanish ñ is a distinct letter between n and o) — and even if that were fixed, it would still be misleading, insofar as it implies that it's used in normal Hausa text; but I think we should probably have something, either in a ==Hausa== section or inside the ==Translingual== section.

—Ruakh_TALK 14:47, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Then what should we do? I would have checked the German umlauts but as it seems, they don't have entries. -- Prince Kassad 14:27, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I think my preference is a sense in the ==Translingual== section along the lines of:

1. (Hausa linguistics) Sometimes used instead of <r> to indicate the rolled R, by contrast with the tapped R which is also written <r>.

if we include the above as "quotations" under the sense line, I think it should be clear enough.

Does that sound reasonable to you?

—Ruakh_TALK 14:55, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

That's fine with me. -- Prince Kassad 14:57, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

 Done, thanks! (And if you have any thoughts later about how to improve it, please do so!) —Ruakh_TALK 17:26, 13 September 2010 (UTC)