Ŭ

Ŭ or ŭ is a letter in the Esperanto alphabet, and is also used in the Belarusian language, when written in the 20th-century form of the Belarusian Latin alphabet. The accent mark (diacritic) is known as a breve.

In the Unicode standard UTF-8 this letter is called Latin capital letter U with Breve and is represented by the code U+016C.

This letter should not be confused with u-caron, which is used to indicate u in the third tone of Chinese language pinyin; Compare Ǔ ǔ (caron) with Ŭ ŭ (breve).

Belarusian

See also: Belarusian alphabet and Belarusian Latin alphabet

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 diphthongs aŭ, eŭ, oŭ and is equivalent to [u̯]. Its Cyrillic counterpart is ў. Sometimes (as in National Geographic atlases), the Cyrillic letter ў is Romanized as w.

Esperanto

Ŭ represents a semivowel in the orthography of Esperanto, which is an international auxiliary language publicly presented in 1887. As in Belarusian, Esperanto Ŭ is pronounced as a non-syllabic [u̯], primarily in the diphthongs aŭ and eŭ.

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.

Other uses

In some philological transcriptions of Latin, "ŭ" denotes a short U — for example, "fŭgō" ([ˈfʊ goː], to chase away), vs "fūmō" ([ˈfuː moː], to smoke).

The McCune–Reischauer Romanization of Korean uses "ŭ" to signify the close back unrounded vowel in 으.

It is also used in ISO 15919 to transcribe the Malayalam language's samvṛtōkāram, an epenthetic vowel.

Several schemes for pronunciation of English words have used "ŭ". For example, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has used "ŭ" for /ʌ/, the vowel in the English word "cut".

See also

• Esperanto orthography
• Short U (Ў, ў) used in Belarusian Cyrillic alphabet
• Breve
• Й

Notes

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter U with diacritics
Úú	Ùù	Ŭŭ	Ûû	Ǔǔ	Ůů	Üü	Ǘǘ	Ǜǜ	Ǚǚ	Ǖǖ	Űű	Ũũ	Ṹṹ	Ųų	Ūū	Ṻṻ	Ủủ	Ȕȕ	Ȗȗ	Ưư	Ứứ	Ừừ	Ữữ	Ửử	Ựự
Ụụ	Ṳṳ	Ṷṷ	Ṵṵ	Ʉʉ	ᵾ	ᶙ
Letters using breve sign ( ◌̆ )
Ăă	Ĕĕ	Ğğ	Ĭ ĭ	Ŏŏ	Ŭŭ
Related
Derivations Diacritics History ISO/IEC 646 List of letters Numerals Palaeography Punctuation Unicode