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The symbol for voiced uvular fricative in IPA is ʁ (an inverted small uppercase letter "R"), but I have noticed that this symbol is not displayed consistently depending on where it is pasted (at least on my computer).

Here are some examples (copy-pasting the symbol from above):

  • Google Search:

enter image description here

  • Google Docs:

enter image description here

Because of this, I am not sure if my computer is showing all the IPA symbols correctly. Has anyone had this problem before? Or could it be that the "direction" of this symbol is actually irrelevant and both mean the same?

Sir Cornflakes
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Ella D.
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  • It appears as a rectangle on my android – Mellifluous Sep 01 '21 at 09:36
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    Hi @jk-ReinstateMonica I'm sorry, I thought so, too, but guess my question really is: Does IPA prescribe what this symbol should look like? – Ella D. Sep 01 '21 at 09:44
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    It is actually showing up differently even on this website: https://imgur.com/EqsB68j – Ella D. Sep 01 '21 at 09:50
  • In principle, yes. Confusion between mirror images of a glyph is certainly a bug in the used fonts. – Sir Cornflakes Sep 01 '21 at 09:51
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    The "facing right" version is that prescribed by the IPA (so reflection of R rather than rotation). See for example https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/IPAcharts/IPA_chart_orig/pdfs/IPA_Kiel_2020_full.pdf – Henry Sep 01 '21 at 10:01
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    @jk-ReinstateMonica: it should be a reflection not a rotation – Henry Sep 01 '21 at 10:04
  • I worded it wrongly, but on my screen the correct character is displayed (using Ubuntu 18.04 and default fonts on firefox) – Sir Cornflakes Sep 01 '21 at 17:08
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    I think this question should remain open (and will vote to reopen if it's closed) because "what does the IPA prescribe about the orientation of this symbol?" is interesting, linguistics-related (we've had IPA question before), and not something I'd considered. – Draconis Sep 02 '21 at 16:17
  • @TomGewecke If you use your browser’s inspector to check the font used on the website in the search field (and also in the header on this page, where it’s also wrong), you can look up that particular font on your system. You can also see in the inspector whether the font used is actually taken from your system at all, or whether it’s a web font. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 02 '21 at 17:06
  • Close vote retracted. – Sir Cornflakes Sep 03 '21 at 14:54

1 Answers1

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This appears to be a bug in Apple's system font San Francisco.

The International Phonetic Association designates the symbol for a voiced uvular fricative to be "Inverted small capital R", ʁ, which is defined in Unicode as LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL INVERTED R at U+0281, and since "inverted" means "flipped along the horizontal axis", it should appear as a vertically flipped version of ʀ (U+0280) and the rendering in your first screenshot should be considered a bug. Unicode does have a code point for LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL TURNED R at U+1D1A, ᴚ, as well as LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL REVERSED R at U+1D19, ᴙ, and all these four should appear distinctly: ʀ ʁ ᴚ ᴙ.

IPA symbols have been known to show up inaccurately in some systems. For example, Helvetica pre-installed on macOS shows ɶ, the symbol for an open front rounded vowel, the same as œ, which represents an open-mid front rounded vowel in the IPA, and Noto Sans used in Android used to show χ, the symbol for a voiceless uvular fricative, the same as x, which represents a voiceless velar fricative.

Nardog
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