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2023-02-24 16:45 dustin  
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still amazed by his encounter with the q-monkey, ^ enters the next cave of his abc journey. here, he learns that "r" was once a head which reminds him much of marge simpson! :d  
  
history of the letter "r":  
  
| the egyptian root was likely a hieroglyph for a human head, which was also adopted into the proto-sinaitic script (see the top shape in the cave). the semitics already spoke the letter like a rolling [r]. note that this sound is quite different from the standard english pronounciation of "r"!   
audio sample for the rolling [r] sound: <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Alveolar_trill.ogg" target="external">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Alveolar_trill.ogg</a>  
(i wanted to link the complete wikipedia artice as usual, but there was a technical problem because the title of the article has a comma.)  
this [r] sound stayed the same in all the following alphabets.  
  
| as usual, the phoenicians, who adopted the proto-sinaitic script, strongly simplified and geometrized the hieroglyph, leaving only the neck and the facing direction/ nose (see the bottom-left shape).  their letter was called "resh" (phoenician for "head") and it was the 20th and third-last letter of their alphabet.  
  
| the ancient greeks adopted the letter and made the "nose" more round. also, they mirrored the letter when the writing direction changed, so that their "rho" looked and still looks pretty much like a "p"! see the bottom-right shape without the empty space.  
  
| the etruscians didn't change the greek letter much, but the romans, who had already made a "p"-shape out of the greek "pi", added a diagonal line to make the letters "p" and "r" look different (bottom-right shape with empty space).  
  
to sum it up, "r" is marge simpson's head! :d the semicircle is the head itself (facing right), the vertical line is the neck and the diagonal line is only there to make "r" look different from "p"!  
  
no puzzle this time; i don't think it's realistic to guess what the letter „s“ was originally! :d  
  
cave difficulty: 2/10