The letter ŭ is called non-syllabic u in Belarusian because it resembles the vowel u but forms no syllables. It is an allophone of that forms the diphthongs aŭ, eŭ, oŭ and is equivalent to. Its Cyrillic counterpart is ў. Sometimes, the Cyrillic letter ў is Romanized as w.
Esperanto
Ŭ represents a semivowel in the orthography of Esperanto, which is an international auxiliary language publicly presented in 1887. As in Belarusian, Esperanto Ŭ is pronounced as a non-syllabic, primarily in the diphthongs aŭ, eŭ and rarely oŭ. It is thought that ŭ was created by analogy with the Belarusian letter ў, which was proposed by P.A. Bessonov in 1870. Ŭ may also be used for in foreign names, such as Ŭaŝingtono for "Washington", although it usually is written with v . It is also used for in onomatopoeias, as in ŭa! "waa!", and uniquely in one native lexical word, ŭo, which is the Esperanto name of the letter ŭ itself.
Romanian
Ŭ was previously part of the Romanian alphabet. U with breve was used only in the ending of a word. It was essentially a Latin equivalent of the Slavonic back yer found in languages like Russian. Unpronounced in most cases, it served to indicate that the previous consonant was not palatalized, or that the preceding i was the vowel and not a mere marker of palatalization. When ŭ was pronounced, it would follow a stressed vowel and stand in for semivowel u, as in words eŭ, aŭ, and meŭ, all spelled today without the breve. Once frequent, it survives today in author Mateiu Caragiale's name – originally spelled Mateiŭ. In other names, only the breve was dropped, while preserving the pronunciation of a semivowel u, as is the case of B.P. Hasdeŭ.
Other uses
In some philological transcriptions of Latin, "ŭ" denotes a short U — for example, "fŭgō", vs "fūmō". The letter is also commonly used among Slavists to denote the short back closed vowel of Proto-Slavic. The McCune–ReischauerRomanization 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, an epenthetic vowel. Several schemes for pronunciation of English words have used "ŭ". For example, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has used "ŭ" for, the vowel in the English word "cut". In Kurrentschrift, an outdated script used in German handwriting, the lower-case letter "u" is adorned with a breve to distinguish it from the otherwise identical letter "n". The script was used for teaching writing in schools; the last variant, known as Sütterlinschrift, as late as 1941. The ingrained habit of writing "ŭ" for "u" persisted for a long time even as people switched to cursive scripts with easily distinguishable shapes for "u" and "n", occasionally leading to confusion between "ŭ" and "ü" among later generations not brought up with this tick.
