This letter should not be confused with u-caron, which is used to indicate u in the third tone of Chinese languagepinyin; compare Ǔ ǔ (caron) with Ŭ ŭ (breve).
The letter ŭ is called non-syllabic u (romanised: u nieskładovaje) in Belarusian because it resembles the vowel u but forms no syllables. It is an allophone of /v/ that forms the diphthongsaŭ, eŭ, oŭ and is equivalent to [u̯]. Its Cyrillic counterpart is ў.[1] Sometimes (as in National Geographic atlases), the Cyrillic letter ў is Romanized as w.
The letter ŭ was proposed by Alexander Rypinski in 1840. For lack of the corresponding type, his book Białoruś. Kilka słów o poezji prostego ludu tej naszej polskiej prowincji, o jego muzyce, śpiewie, tańcach was printed with û in Belarusian citations instead, but it was explained that the proper letter was u with Latin brevis. The proper letter ŭ was first used in printing in 1845, in the novel Tajemnicze domino czyli Skutki niestałości by Gabriel Ossowski (in Polish with occasional Belarusian).
It is thought that ŭ was created by analogy with the Belarusian letter ў (Cyrillic u with breve), which was proposed by P.A. Bessonov in 1870.[2] It may also be considered that the placement of the breve above a vowel letter to turn it into an equivalent semivowel was inspired by the use thereof on the Cyrillic letter й, representing /j/ and formed by placing a breve over the letter и, used most commonly to represent /i/.
Ŭ may also be used for [w] in foreign names, such as Ŭaŝingtono for "Washington", although it usually is written with v (Vaŝingtono). It is also used for [w] in onomatopoeias, as in ŭa! "waa!", and uniquely in one native lexical word, ŭo, which is the Esperanto name of the letter ŭ itself.
Romanian
Ŭ was previously part of the Romanian alphabet. U with breve was used only in the ending of a word. It was essentially a Latin equivalent of the Slavonic back yer found in languages like Russian. Unpronounced in most cases, it served to indicate that the previous consonant was not palatalized, or that the preceding i was the vowel [i] and not a mere marker of palatalization. When ŭ was pronounced, it would follow a stressed vowel and stand in for semivowel u, as in words eŭ, aŭ, and meŭ, all spelled today without the breve. Once frequent, it survives today in author Mateiu Caragiale's name – originally spelled Mateiŭ (it is not specified whether the pronunciation should adopt a version that he himself probably never used, while in many editions he is still credited as Matei). In other names, only the breve was dropped, while preserving the pronunciation of a semivowel u, as is the case of B.P. Hasdeŭ.
Romanization of Indic scripts
When transcribing Malayalam texts into ISO 15919, usually the final glottal-stop is transcribed as 'ŭ', an epenthetic vowel (a rule called as saṁvr̥tōkāram). In Tamil, any wordfinal-'u' is always a short-vowel, hence transcribing it as 'ŭ' (a rule called as kuṟṟiyal ukaram). The Kashmiri vowel –ٕ/ॖ is also sometimes transcribed as 'ŭ'.
Other uses
In some philological transcriptions of Latin, "ŭ" denotes a short U — for example, "fŭgō" ([ˈfʊɡoː], to chase away), vs "fūmō" ([ˈfuːmoː], to smoke).
The letter is also commonly used among Slavists to denote the short back closed vowel of Proto-Slavic.
In Kurrentschrift, an outdated script used in German handwriting, the lower-case letter "u" is adorned with a breve to distinguish it from the otherwise identical letter "n". The script was used for teaching writing in schools; the last variant, known as Sütterlinschrift, as late as 1941. The ingrained habit of writing "ŭ" for "u" persisted for a long time even as people switched to cursive scripts with easily distinguishable shapes for "u" and "n", occasionally leading to confusion between "ŭ" (meaning "u") and "ü" among later generations not brought up with this tick.
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ⟨ó⟩, grave ⟨ò⟩, and circumflex ⟨ô⟩, are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
Esperanto is written in a Latin-script alphabet of twenty-eight letters, with upper and lower case. This is supplemented by punctuation marks and by various logograms, such as the digits 0–9, currency signs such as $ € ¥ £ ₷, and mathematical symbols. The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, declared a principle of "one letter, one sound", though this is a general rather than strict guideline.
A breve is the diacritic mark ◌̆, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called brachy, βραχύ. It resembles the caron but is rounded, in contrast to the angular tip of the caron. In many forms of Latin, ◌̆ is used for a shorter, softer variant of a vowel, such as "Ĭ", where the sound is nearly identical to the English /i/.
A caronKARR-ən. or háček, is a diacritic mark placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation. Typographers tend to use the term caron, while linguists prefer the Czech word háček.
The Russian alphabet is the script used to write the Russian language. It is derived from the Cyrillic script, which was modified in the 9th century to capture accurately the phonology of the first Slavic literary language, Old Slavonic. Initially an old variant of the Bulgarian alphabet, it was used in Kievan Rus' from the 10th century onward to write what would become the modern Russian language.
A ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.
The Cyrillic I is a letter used in almost all modern Cyrillic alphabets with the exception of Belarusian.
Adyghe is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken by the western subgroups of Circassians. It is spoken mainly in Russia, as well as in Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Israel, where Circassians settled after the Circassian genocide by the Russian Empire. It is closely related to the Kabardian language, though some reject the distinction between the two languages in favor of both being dialects of a unitary Circassian language.
The Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet is used to write the Bulgarian language. The Cyrillic alphabet was originally developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th – 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School.
Ve is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced labiodental fricative, like ⟨v⟩ in "vase". It can also represent.
Short I or Yot/Jot or I with breve, Russian: и с бреве) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It is made of the Cyrillic letter И with a breve.
U is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the close back rounded vowel, somewhat like the pronunciation of ⟨oo⟩ in "boot" or "rule". The forms of the Cyrillic letter U are similar to the lowercase of the Latin letter Y, with the lowercase Cyrillic letter U's form being identical to that of small Latin letter Y.
The Ukrainian alphabet is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, which is the official language of Ukraine. It is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, called Old Slavonic. In the 10th century, Cyrillic script became used in Kievan Rus' to write Old East Slavic, from which the Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian alphabets later evolved. The modern Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters in total: 21 consonants, 1 semivowel, 10 vowels and 1 palatalization sign. Sometimes the apostrophe (') is also included, which has a phonetic meaning and is a mandatory sign in writing, but is not considered as a letter and is not included in the alphabet.
Short U or U with breve is a letter of the Cyrillic script. The only Slavic language using the letter in its orthography is Belarusian, but it is also used as a phonetic symbol in some Russian and Ukrainian dictionaries. Among the non-Slavic languages using Cyrillic alphabets, ў is used in Dungan, Karakalpak, Karachay-Balkar, Mansi, Sakhalin Nivkh, Ossetian and Siberian Yupik. It is also used in Uzbek – this letter corresponds to Oʻ in the Uzbek Latin alphabet.
The Belarusian alphabet is based on the Cyrillic script and is derived from the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic. It has existed in its modern form since 1918 and has 32 letters. See also Belarusian Latin alphabet and Belarusian Arabic alphabet.
The Kazakh language is written in three scripts – Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic – each having a distinct alphabet. The Arabic script is used in Iran, Afghanistan, and China, while the Cyrillic script is used in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Mongolia. In October 2017, a presidential decree in Kazakhstan ordered a transition from the Cyrillic to Latin script to be phased in from 2023 to 2031.
Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire.
The Karelian language is spoken in Russia, mostly in the Karelian Republic and in a small region just north of Tver, though most residents there were expelled in 1939. Karelian has seen numerous proposed and adopted alphabets over the centuries, both Latin and Cyrillic. In 2007, the current standardized Karelian alphabet was introduced and is used to write all varieties of Karelian, including Tver Karelian which adopted it in 2017.
Inverted breve or arch is a diacritical mark, shaped like the top half of a circle ( ̑ ), that is, like an upside-down breve (˘). It looks similar to the circumflex (ˆ), which has a sharp tip, while the inverted breve is rounded:.
Yo, Jo, Io, or Ye with diaeresis is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Unicode, the letter ⟨Ё⟩ is named CYRILLIC CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER IO.
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