R rotunda

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The r rotunda in a Latin Bible of AD 1407, on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England.

The r rotunda, as rendered by the Leeds Uni font.

The r rotunda (ꝛ, always lowercase) is an old letter variant. Between the Middle Ages and today, many ways of writing alphabetical characters were lost. Besides a variety of ligatures, conjoined letters, scribal abbreviations, swash characters, and the "long s" with its own ligatures, one was the "r rotunda". Like many of the practices listed, this variant form of that letter was originally devised either to save space while writing on expensive parchment or for aesthetic reasons.

This "r"-shape was used at first only after the letter "o". It progressed to follow any letter that ended in a curved stroke. Hence it would be used following the letters "b", "o", and "p". Often it was used after "d", for in many of those old typefaces the vertical stroke of that letter was curled to the left (as it still is in the Icelandic letter "ð"). It never began a word. This symbol came in several different shapes, all of which were of x-height.

[edit] Original form

The shape of the letter used in blackletter scripts Textualis as well as Rotunda is reminiscent of “half an r”, namely, the right side of the Roman capital “R”; it looks a bit like an Arabic numeral “2”.

This character form also played a part in a common scribal abbreviation. The tail was extended to the right and a cross-bar was put through it, producing a figure very much like the ancient Greek symbol for the planet Jupiter. This stood for the Latin syllable ram as well as the genitive plural terminations, —orum and —arum. This abbreviation character could follow any other character.

[edit] Other forms

Also found in Textura manuscripts is a very narrow second variant, in the form of one solid diamond atop another atop a vertical stroke.

One form used in blackletter looked quite similar to the currency sign for the British pound without the crossbars. But it had no loop at the top and its understroke was quite short.

Another form found in German typefaces was a variant of that previous, with the part of an "s" that looks like an integral sign atop something rather like a "c". This one can be found used also as the second "r" of a pair and following "e".

[edit] Italic form

A fifth form, used in the eighteenth century in some French italic typefaces, was a derivative either of the Schrift form of the minuscule "r", or of similar typefaces used elsewhere. Its form was of a backwards "J" set just after the same shape rotated 180 degrees. They were separated by a space smaller than the stroke width between them, and the whole character was slanted as though it were cursive. As this typeface had the "d" that curved to the left, it was used after that character as well. By this time, though, the character was the same width as a regular "r", so it was maintained because it appeared to its users to have some elegance, or to remind them of prestigious old calligraphy.

[edit] Demise of the r rotunda

Comparison of the r rotunda and the normal r using the Leeds Uni typeface

Usage of the letter form was never widespread except in blackletter scripts, so it fell out of use in English during the 16th century as roman scripts became predominant.

The r rotunda was not encoded in Unicode up to the fourth version of that standard. The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative allocated it in the Private Use Area of medievalist fonts at U+F20E. The letter was submitted in a preliminary proposal to be added to Unicode and was later codified in Unicode 5.1, superseding the MUFI allocation. The positions are U+A75A (majuscule) and U+A75B (minuscule).