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'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).

Contents

Belarusian

Esperanto

Other uses

See also

Notes

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^[1] in diphthongs such as ''aŭ, eŭ, oŭ''. The Cyrillic counterpart of it 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, in the diphthongs ''aŭ'', ''eŭ'', and is represented by in the IPA.
There is a hypothesis 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^[2]. It is of course equally likely that the Ŭ developed independently in both Esperanto and Belarusian.
In some Esperanto literature (usually humorous), the letter replaces the English ''w'' in spelled-out sound effects, 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.

See also

★ Esperanto alphabet

★ Short U (Ў, ў) used in Belarusian Cyrillic alphabet

★ Breve

Notes

1. 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.''
2. Булыка (Bulyka). У нескладовае // Энцыклапедыя літаратуры і мастацтва Беларусі. Т.4. p.377.