The letter originates from the letter izhitsa with a breve used in certain Ukrainian books at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries. Later, this character was probably in use in the Romanian Cyrillic script, from where it was borrowed in 1837 by the compilers of Ukrainian poetry book Rusalka Dnistrovaja. The book's foreword reads “we have accepted Serbian џ... and Wallachian ў...”. In this book, is used mostly for etymological transformed to . Modern Ukrainian spelling uses in that position. For Belarusian, the combination of the Cyrillic letter U with a breve was proposed by P.A. Bessonov in 1870. Before that, various ad hocadaptations of the Latin U were used, for example, italicized in some publications of Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich, with acute accent in Jan Czeczot's Da milykh mužyczkoú, W with breve in Epimakh-Shypila, 1889, or just the letter itself. A U with haček was also used. After 1870, both the distinction for the phoneme and the new shape of the letter still were not consistently used until the mid-1900s for technical problems, per Bulyka. Among the first publications using it were folklore collections published by Michał Federowski and the first edition of Francišak Bahuševič's Dudka Biełaruskaja. For quite a while other kinds of renderings were still being used, sometimes within a single publication, also supposedly because of technical problems.
Usage
Belarusian
The letter is called non-syllabic u or short u in Belarusian because although it resembles the vowel у, it does not form syllables. Its equivalent in the Belarusian Latin alphabet is,Б. Тарашкевіч. Беларуская граматыка для школ. – Вільня : Беларуская друкарня ім. Фр. Скарыны, 1929 ; Мн. : «Народная асвета», 1991 . – Выданьне пятае пераробленае і пашыранае. although it is also sometimes transcribed as. In native Belarusian words, represents a, as in хлеў, pronounced or воўк . This is similar to the in English cow. The letter cannot occur before a non-iotified vowel in native words; when that would be required by grammar would, is replaced by . Compare хлеў with за хлявом. Also, when a word starts with and follows a vowel and so it forms a diphthong through liaison, it is usually, but not necessarily, written with instead. For example, у хляве but увайшлі яны ў хлеў. The letter is also sometimes used to represent the labial-velar approximant in foreign loanwords: this usage is allowed by the 2005 standardization of Taraškievica. When it is used thus it can appear before non-iotified vowels.
Uzbek
This letter is the 32nd letter of the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet. It corresponds to Oʻ in the current Uzbek alphabet. It is different from the regular O, which is represented by the Cyrillic letterО. Furthermore, it is pronounced as either or, in contrast to the letter O, which is pronounced as.
Monument
In September 2003, during the tenth Days of Belarusian Literacy celebrations, the authorities in Polatsk, the oldest Belarusian city, made a monument to honor the unique Cyrillic Belarusian letter. The original idea for the monument came from professor Paval Siemčanka, a scholar of Cyrillic calligraphy and type.
