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U (Cyrillic)

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

In some languages variations of this letter are used:

• Ў with breve (in Belarusian, Dungan^[1], Siberian Eskimo (Yuit), Uzbek)
• Ӯ with macron (in Tajik)
• Ӱ with diaeresis (in Altai (Oyrot), Khakas, Gagauz, Khanty, Mari)
• Ӳ with double acute accent (in Chuvash)
• straight Ү (in Mongolian, Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, Dungan and other languages)
• straight 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 /u/. The digraph was itself a direct loan from the Greek alphabet, where the combination ου (omicron-upsilon) was also used to represent /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 (Ѵ). (The letter izhitsa was removed from the Russian alphabet in the orthography reform of 1917/19.)

Footnotes

1. ^ However, many Dungan books are in fact set using 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)