Ŭ

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Ŭ or ŭ is a letter in the Belarusian language, when written in the 20th century 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 nieskładovaje) in Belarusian, because while resembling vowel u it doesn't form syllables. It is an allophone of /v/ that forms the diphthongs aŭ, eŭ, oŭ and is equivalent to [u̯]. Its Cyrillic counterpart is ў.^[1]

See also: Belarusian alphabet, Belarusian Latin alphabet.

Esperanto

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Ŭ represents a semivowel in the orthography of Esperanto, which is an international auxiliary language created in the late 19th century. As in Belarusian, Esperanto Ŭ is pronounced as a non-syllabic close back vowel (IPA: [u̯]), primarily used 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.^{[2][citation needed]}

Ŭ may also be used for [w] in foreign names, such as Ŭaŝingtono for "Washington", though conservative usage replaces it with v (Vaŝintono). 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

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.

See also

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

Notes

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