Ŭ

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

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

The letter "ŭ" is called "non-syllabic u" (romanised: "u nyeskladovaye") in Belarusian, because while resembling vowel "u" it doesn't form syllables. It represents a sonorant bilabial fricative consonant [E.g., per "Беларуская мова: Вучэб. дапам. / Э. Д. Блінава, Н. В. Гаўрош, М. Ц. Кавалёва і інш.; Пад рэд. М. С. Яўневіча. — Мн. : Выш. школа, 1991. ISBN 5-339-00539-9."] in diphthongs such as "aŭ, eŭ, oŭ"; it is equivalent to IPA2|u̯. Its Cyrillic counterpart is "ў".

"See also": Belarusian alphabet, Belarusian Latin alphabet.

Esperanto

Ŭ also represents a semivowel in Esperanto orthography, which was devised in the late 19th century. As in Belarusian, Esperanto Ŭ is pronounced as a non-syllabic close back vowel (IPA2|u̯) in the diphthongs "aŭ" and "eŭ".

There is a hypothesisFact|date=March 2007 that the Esperanto letter was derived from Belarusian, which may be corroborated by the fact that the Cyrillic letter "Ў" (Cyrillic U with breve) was proposed by P.A. Bessonov in 1870 [ Булыка (Bulyka). У нескладовае // Энцыклапедыя літаратуры і мастацтва Беларусі. Т.4. p.377.] . It is of course also possible that Ŭ developed independently in both Esperanto and Belarusian.

In some Esperanto literature (usually humorous), the letter replaces the English "w" in onomatopoeia, as "ŭomp!" for "womp!"

Other uses

It is also a letter in some philological transcriptions of Latin, denoting a short U. 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.

ee also

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

Notes