U (Cyrillic)

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Heading=Cyrillic letter U


uuc=0423|ulc=0443

U (У, у) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, representing the vowel IPA|/u/ after non-palatalized (hard) consonants.

In some languages variations of this letter are used:

* Ў with breve (in Belarusian, Dungan [However, many Dungan books are in fact set using Unicode|Ӯ (with macron) instead of Ў with breve, e.g. the Dungan-Russian dictionary (1968). There is never an ambiguity, as this is the only У-with-a-diacritic in Dungan. It is used in Dungan syllables where pinyin would use "-u", except in those with labial consonants (i.e. in "du", ' "nu", "lu", "gu", "hu", "zu", "ru", etc., but not "bu" or "mu")] , Siberian Eskimo (Yuit), Uzbek)
* with macron (in Tajik)
* with diaeresis (in Altai (Oyrot), Khakas, Gagauz, Khanty, Mari)
* with double acute accent (in Chuvash)
* straight Unicode|Ү (in Mongolian, Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, Dungan and other languages)
* straight Unicode|Ұ with bar (in Kazakh)

History

Historically, this letter evolved as a specifically East Slavic short form of the digraph оу used in ancient Slavic texts to represent IPA|/u/. The digraph was itself a direct loan from the Greek alphabet, where the combination ου (omicron-upsilon) was also used to represent IPA|/u/.

Consequently, the form of the letter is derived from Greek upsilon, which was parallelly also taken over into the Cyrillic alphabet in another form, as izhitsa (Unicode|Ѵ). (The letter izhitsa was removed from the Russian alphabet in the orthography reform of 1917/19.)

ee also

*U, u - Latin
*Y, y - Latin
*Υ, υ - Upsilon (Greek)

Footnotes