rêš

Resh is the twentieth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ''rēš'' 𐤓, Hebrew ''rēš'' , Aramaic ''rēš'' 𐡓‎, Syriac ''rēš'' ܪ, and Arabic ''rāʾ'' . It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪇‎‎, South Arabian , and Ge'ez . Its sound value is one of a number of rhotic consonants: usually or , but also or in Hebrew and some North Mesopotamian Arabic dialects.

In most Semitic alphabets, the letter resh (and its equivalents) is quite similar to the letter dalet (and its equivalents). In the Syriac alphabet, the letters became so similar that now they are only distinguished by a dot: resh has a dot above the letter, and the otherwise identical dalet has a dot below the letter. In the Arabic alphabet, has a longer tail than . In the Aramaic and Hebrew square alphabet, resh is a rounded single stroke while dalet is a right-angle of two strokes.

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek rho (Ρ/ρ), Etruscan , Latin R, Glagolitic Ⱃ, and Cyrillic Р and Armenian Ռ and Ր.

Origins

''Resh'' is usually assumed to mean head, as in Proto-Semitic *raʾ(i)š- and descendants.
D1

Arabic rāʾ

The letter is named in Arabic. It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:

It ranges between an alveolar trill , an alveolar flap , and a uvular trill (the last of which is only found in a few modern varieties). It is pronounced as a postalveolar approximant ɹ̠">Voiced_postalveolar_approximant.html" ;"title="nowiki/> ɹ̠in the traditional Fessi dialect">dialect of Fes.

Derived letter in other languages

The Unicode">Voiced postalveolar approximant">ɹ̠in the traditional Fessi dialect">dialect of Fes.

Derived letter in other languages

The Unicode standard for Arabic scripts also lists a variant with a full stroke (Unicode character U+075b: ݛ), suggesting that this form is used in certain Northern and Western African languages and some dialects in Pakistan.

In the Pashto alphabet, a variant of the letter ''rāʾ'' uses a ring below for the retroflex consonant and another uses dots above and below the tail for the voiced fricative or :

Hebrew resh

Hebrew spelling:

In Hebrew, Resh () represents a rhotic consonant that has different realizations for different dialects:
* In Modern Hebrew, the most common pronunciation is the voiced uvular fricative .
* Ashkenazi use sometimes a uvular trill or an alveolar trill . Native English-speakers replace it sometimes with an alveolar approximant , as in English.
* Sephardic and Mizrahi use an alveolar trill , an alveolar flap or uvular trill .

As a general rule, Resh, along with Ayin, Aleph, He, and Het, do not receive a dagesh. There are a handful of exceptions to this rule. In the Yemenite tradition, Resh is treated as most other consonants in that it can receive a ''dagesh hazak'' under certain circumstances. In the most widely accepted version of the Hebrew Bible

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