- The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is Ŭ.
"Ŭ" or "ŭ" is a letter in the Belarusian language, when written in the Łacinka alphabet (based on the Latin alphabet), as was normal from the 16th to late 19th centuries. Its use has been slowly reemerging since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The letter is pronounced with a consistent sound, represented by [w] in SAMPA and IPA. When Belarusian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, the same letter is written as /ў/.
It is also a letter in some philological transcriptions of Latin, denoting a shorter U, and the McCune-Reischauer Romanization of Korean uses "ŭ" to signify the vowel "ɯ".
Esperanto
"Ŭ" is a semivowel in the Esperanto alphabet, which was devised in the late 19th century. Its sound is represented by [w] in SAMPA and IPA, and was originally meant to indicate a doubled u, or w, sound.
The Esperanto letter was derived from Belarusian, which can be inferred from these observations:
- Belarusian is the only natural language whose orthography contains this letter.
- The letter has the same pronunciation in the two languages.
- Esperanto's creator, Ludwik Zamenhof, was born in Białystok in the vicinity of Belarus.
- There is considerable evidence that Zamenhof referred primarily to his native dialect when constructing Esperanto.
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