This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. (October 2018) |
Ü (lowercase ü) is a Latin script character composed of the letter U and the diaeresis diacritical mark. In some alphabets such as those of a number of Romance languages or Guarani it denotes an instance of regular U to be construed in isolation from adjacent characters with which it would usually form a larger unit; other alphabets like the Azerbaijani, Estonian, German, Hungarian and Turkish ones treat it as a letter in its own right. In those cases it typically represents a close front rounded vowel [y] .
| U with umlaut/diaeresis | |
|---|---|
| Ü ü | |
| V, UE, II | |
 | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Latin script |
| Type | alphabetic |
| Sound values | [ɨ] |
| History | |
| Development | UE
|
| Variations | V, UE, II |
| This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
Although not a part of their alphabet, Ü also appears in languages such as Finnish and Swedish when retained in foreign proper names like München ("Munich"). A small number of Dutch and Afrikaans words employ the character to mark vowel hiatus (e.g. reünie /reːyˈni/ ("reunion"), a loanword marked with diaeresis to suppress the native reading of eu as a digraph pronounced /øː/).
U-umlaut
A glyph, U with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of u, which results in [yː] when long and [ʏ] when short. The letter is collated together with U, or as UE. In languages that have adopted German names or spellings, such as Swedish, the letter also occurs. It is however not a part of these languages' alphabets. In Swedish the letter is called tyskt y which means German y.
Though not a part of the Slovene alphabet, ü is often used in eastern Styrian dialects, especially around Ptuj as well as in the Resian dialect with the same pronouncation as in German.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII, U-umlaut is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "ue". Software for optical character recognition sometimes sees it falsely as ii.
Letter Ü
The letter Ü is present in the Hungarian, Turkish, Uyghur Latin, Estonian, Azeri, Turkmen, Crimean Tatar, Kazakh Latin and Tatar Latin alphabets, where it represents a close front rounded vowel [y]. It is considered a distinct letter, collated separately, not a simple modification of U or Y, and is distinct from UE.
Wayuu represents the close central unrounded vowel [ɨ] using this letter.
In the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish alphabets ü is alphabetized as y.
It is not present in the Basque alphabet but the Souletin dialect uses it for [y].
This same letter appears in the Chinese Romanisations Pinyin, Wade–Giles, and the German-based Lessing-Othmer, where it represents the same sound [y]: 綠/lǜ (green) or 女/nǚ (female). Standard Mandarin Chinese pronunciation has both the sounds [y] and [u]. Pinyin only uses "Ü" to represent [y] after the letters "L" or "N" to avoid confusion with words such as 路/lù (road) and 怒/nù (anger). Words such as 玉/yù (jade) or 句/jù (sentence) are pronounced with [y], but are not spelled with "Ü", although Wade–Giles and Lessing use "Ü" in all situations. As the letter "Ü" is missing on most keyboards and the letter "V" is not present in standard Mandarin pinyin, the letter "V" is used on most computer Chinese input methods to enter the letter "Ü". As a result, romanisation of Chinese with the letter "V" representing the Ü sound is sometimes found. However, Ü sound should be officially represented by "yu" in Pinyin when it is difficult to enter Ü. For example, the surname Lü (吕) would be written as "Lyu" in passports. Four extra tones for the letter "ü", which are "ǖ, ǘ, ǚ, ǜ", is added in Unicode as per GB/T 2312.
U-diaeresis
Several languages use diaeresis over the letter U to show that the letter is pronounced in its regular way, without dropping out or building diphthongs with neighbouring letters.
In Catalan, ü is used in the letter combinations güe, güi, qüe and qüi to indicate the pronunciation [ɡwe], [ɡwi], [kwe] or [kwi], respectively (e.g. nicaragüenc, pingüins, qüestió, aqüicultura); this contrasts with the combinations gue/gui/que/qui, in which the u is silent ([ɡe], [ɡi], [ke], [ki]). Catalan also uses the letter ü to indicate that a vowel pair that would normally form a diphthong must be pronounced as separate syllables (e.g. baül, diürna).
Similarly, in Spanish, ü is used in the combinations güe [ɡwe] and güi [ɡwi], to distinguish them from "gue" [ɡe] and "gui" [ɡi] (e.g. nicaragüense, pingüinos). Unlike Catalan, though, Spanish does not use it after q, instead using cue and cui to spell words with [kwe] or [kwi] sounds (cuestión, acuicultura); it also does not use it to break diphthongs, sometimes using the letter ú for that purpose when necessary (baúl, but diurna).
In French, the diaeresis appears over the "u" only very rarely, in some uncommon words, capharnaüm [-aɔm] ('shambles'), Capharnaüm/Capernaüm [-aɔm] or Emmaüs [-ays]. After the 1990 spelling reforms, it is applied to a few more words, like aigüe (formerly aiguë), ambigüe (formerly ambiguë) and argüer [aʁɡɥe] (formerly without the diaeresis).
Usage in phonetic alphabets
In the Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German, Low Rhenish, and related vernacular languages, "ü" represents a range from [y] to [ʏ].
Typography
Historically the unique letter Ü and U-diaeresis were written as a U with two dots above the letter.
U-umlaut was written as a U with a small e written above (Uͤ uͤ): this minute e degenerated to two vertical bars in medieval handwritings. In most later handwritings these bars in turn nearly became dots.
In modern typography there was insufficient space on typewriters and later computer keyboards to allow for both a U-with-dots (also representing Ü) and a U-with-bars. Since they looked near-identical the two glyphs were combined, which was also done in computer character encodings such as ISO 8859-1. As a result, there was no way to differentiate between the three different characters. While the distinction can be recreated in modern Unicode using combining diacritics, modern typographic standards do not recommend doing so. In the Hungarian alphabet, double acute U (Ű) is a distinct letter representing a long Ü.
Computing codes
| Preview | Ü | ü | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS | LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 220 | U+00DC | 252 | U+00FC |
| UTF-8 | 195 156 | C3 9C | 195 188 | C3 BC |
| GB 18030 | 129 48 137 53 | 81 30 89 35 | 168 185 | A8 B9 |
| Numeric character reference | Ü | Ü | ü | ü |
| Named character reference | Ü | ü | ||
| EBCDIC family | 252 | FC | 220 | DC |
| ISO 8859-1/2/3/4/9/10/14/15/16 | 220 | DC | 252 | FC |
| CP437 | 154 | 9A | 129 | 81 |
| Code page 10029 | 134 | 86 | 159 | 9F |
| GB/T 2312, GBK, GB 18030 | 168 185 | A8 B9 | ||
| HKSCS | 136 162 | 88 A2 | ||
Tonal marks for Hanyu Pinyin
| Preview | Ǖ | ǖ | Ǘ | ǘ | Ǚ | ǚ | Ǜ | ǜ | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND MACRON | LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND MACRON | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND ACUTE | LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND ACUTE | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND CARON | LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND CARON | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND GRAVE | LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND GRAVE | ||||||||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 469 | U+01D5 | 470 | U+01D6 | 471 | U+01D7 | 472 | U+01D8 | 473 | U+01D9 | 474 | U+01DA | 475 | U+01DB | 476 | U+01DC |
| UTF-8 | 199 149 | C7 95 | 199 150 | C7 96 | 199 151 | C7 97 | 199 152 | C7 98 | 199 153 | C7 99 | 199 154 | C7 9A | 199 155 | C7 9B | 199 156 | C7 9C |
| GB 18030 | 129 48 159 57 | 81 30 9F 39 | 168 181 | A8 B5 | 129 48 160 48 | 81 30 A0 30 | 168 182 | A8 B6 | 129 48 160 49 | 81 30 A0 31 | 168 183 | A8 B7 | 129 48 160 50 | 81 30 A0 32 | 168 184 | A8 B8 |
| Numeric character reference | Ǖ | Ǖ | ǖ | ǖ | Ǘ | Ǘ | ǘ | ǘ | Ǚ | Ǚ | ǚ | ǚ | Ǜ | Ǜ | ǜ | ǜ |
| GB/T 2312, GBK, GB 18030 | 168 181 | A8 B5 | 168 182 | A8 B6 | 168 183 | A8 B7 | 168 184 | A8 B8 | ||||||||
| HKSCS | 136 124 | 88 7C | 136 125 | 88 7D | 136 126 | 88 7E | 136 161 | 88 A1 | ||||||||
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet symbols related to Ü
| Preview | ᴞ | |
|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN SMALL LETTER SIDEWAYS DIAERESIZED U | |
| Encodings | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 7454 | U+1D1E |
| UTF-8 | 225 180 158 | E1 B4 9E |
| GB 18030 | 129 53 215 56 | 81 35 D7 38 |
| Numeric character reference | ᴞ | ᴞ |
Keyboarding
The methods available for entering ⟨Ü⟩ and ⟨ü⟩ from the keyboard depend on the operating system, the keyboard layout, and the application.
- Microsoft Windows – some keyboard layouts feature separate keys for ⟨Ü⟩
- Using the Swiss French keyboard, ⟨ü⟩ can be entered by typing ⇧ Shift+È
- Using the US International layout, ⟨ü⟩ can be entered by typing AltGR+Y
- Microsoft Windows: with the Number Lock on, hold down the Alt key while typing on the numeric keypad the decimal value of the code point from the active DOS/OEM code page without a leading zero, then release the Alt key; i.e. Alt+1+5+4 for ⟨Ü⟩ and Alt+1+2+9 for ⟨ü⟩
- Microsoft Windows: with the Number Lock on, hold down the Alt key while typing on the numeric keypad the decimal value of the code point from the active ANSI code page with a leading zero, then release the Alt key; i.e. Alt+0+2+2+0 for ⟨Ü⟩ and Alt+0+2+5+2 for ⟨ü⟩
- Microsoft Word for Windows: type Ctrl+: followed by ⇧ Shift+U for ⟨Ü⟩ or Ctrl+: then U for ⟨ü⟩
- macOS with an English keyboard layout (Australian, British, or U.S.): type ⌥ Option+U followed by ⇧ Shift+U for ⟨Ü⟩ or ⌥ Option+U and then U for ⟨ü⟩ or by keeping the U key pressed and then typing 2
- In Linux-based operating systems, this symbol may be typed by pressing the Compose key followed by u, ".
- In GTK-based GUI-Applications, Ctrl+⇧ Shift+U followed by the Hex-Code
See also
- Umlaut (diacritic)
- Ӱ ӱ : Cyrillic letter U with diaeresis
- Ү ү : Cyrillic letter Ue
References
- "About Lük - Ptujski Lük".
- 新版护照“吕”姓改拼“LYU” 英文无ü被替代. Beijing Daily. 2012-10-11.
This article relies largely or entirely on a single source Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources Find sources U news newspapers books scholar JSTOR October 2018 U lowercase u is a Latin script character composed of the letter U and the diaeresis diacritical mark In some alphabets such as those of a number of Romance languages or Guarani it denotes an instance of regular U to be construed in isolation from adjacent characters with which it would usually form a larger unit other alphabets like the Azerbaijani Estonian German Hungarian and Turkish ones treat it as a letter in its own right In those cases it typically represents a close front rounded vowel y U with umlaut diaeresisU uV UE IIUsageWriting systemLatin scriptTypealphabeticSound values y ʏ u w ɔ ɥ yː ɨ HistoryDevelopmentUEU u U uVariationsV UE IIThis article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet IPA For an introductory guide on IPA symbols see Help IPA For the distinction between and see IPA Brackets and transcription delimiters Although not a part of their alphabet U also appears in languages such as Finnish and Swedish when retained in foreign proper names like Munchen Munich A small number of Dutch and Afrikaans words employ the character to mark vowel hiatus e g reunie reːyˈni reunion a loanword marked with diaeresis to suppress the native reading of eu as a digraph pronounced oː U umlautA glyph U with umlaut appears in the German alphabet It represents the umlauted form of u which results in yː when long and ʏ when short The letter is collated together with U or as UE In languages that have adopted German names or spellings such as Swedish the letter also occurs It is however not a part of these languages alphabets In Swedish the letter is called tyskt y which means German y Though not a part of the Slovene alphabet u is often used in eastern Styrian dialects especially around Ptuj as well as in the Resian dialect with the same pronouncation as in German In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII U umlaut is frequently replaced with the two letter combination ue Software for optical character recognition sometimes sees it falsely as ii Letter UThe letter U is present in the Hungarian Turkish Uyghur Latin Estonian Azeri Turkmen Crimean Tatar Kazakh Latin and Tatar Latin alphabets where it represents a close front rounded vowel y It is considered a distinct letter collated separately not a simple modification of U or Y and is distinct from UE Wayuu represents the close central unrounded vowel ɨ using this letter In the Swedish Danish Norwegian and Finnish alphabets u is alphabetized as y It is not present in the Basque alphabet but the Souletin dialect uses it for y This same letter appears in the Chinese Romanisations Pinyin Wade Giles and the German based Lessing Othmer where it represents the same sound y 綠 lǜ green or 女 nǚ female Standard Mandarin Chinese pronunciation has both the sounds y and u Pinyin only uses U to represent y after the letters L or N to avoid confusion with words such as 路 lu road and 怒 nu anger Words such as 玉 yu jade or 句 ju sentence are pronounced with y but are not spelled with U although Wade Giles and Lessing use U in all situations As the letter U is missing on most keyboards and the letter V is not present in standard Mandarin pinyin the letter V is used on most computer Chinese input methods to enter the letter U As a result romanisation of Chinese with the letter V representing the U sound is sometimes found However U sound should be officially represented by yu in Pinyin when it is difficult to enter U For example the surname Lu 吕 would be written as Lyu in passports Four extra tones for the letter u which are ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ is added in Unicode as per GB T 2312 U diaeresisSeveral languages use diaeresis over the letter U to show that the letter is pronounced in its regular way without dropping out or building diphthongs with neighbouring letters In Catalan u is used in the letter combinations gue gui que and qui to indicate the pronunciation ɡwe ɡwi kwe or kwi respectively e g nicaraguenc pinguins questio aquicultura this contrasts with the combinations gue gui que qui in which the u is silent ɡe ɡi ke ki Catalan also uses the letter u to indicate that a vowel pair that would normally form a diphthong must be pronounced as separate syllables e g baul diurna Similarly in Spanish u is used in the combinations gue ɡwe and gui ɡwi to distinguish them from gue ɡe and gui ɡi e g nicaraguense pinguinos Unlike Catalan though Spanish does not use it after q instead using cue and cui to spell words with kwe or kwi sounds cuestion acuicultura it also does not use it to break diphthongs sometimes using the letter u for that purpose when necessary baul but diurna In French the diaeresis appears over the u only very rarely in some uncommon words capharnaum aɔm shambles Capharnaum Capernaum aɔm or Emmaus ays After the 1990 spelling reforms it is applied to a few more words like aigue formerly aigue ambigue formerly ambigue and arguer aʁɡɥe formerly without the diaeresis Usage in phonetic alphabetsIn the Rheinische Dokumenta a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German Low Rhenish and related vernacular languages u represents a range from y to ʏ TypographyJohann Martin Schleyer proposed alternate forms for U and u Ꞟ and ꞟ respectively in Volapuk but they were rarely used Historically the unique letter U and U diaeresis were written as a U with two dots above the letter U umlaut was written as a U with a small e written above U u this minute e degenerated to two vertical bars in medieval handwritings In most later handwritings these bars in turn nearly became dots In modern typography there was insufficient space on typewriters and later computer keyboards to allow for both a U with dots also representing U and a U with bars Since they looked near identical the two glyphs were combined which was also done in computer character encodings such as ISO 8859 1 As a result there was no way to differentiate between the three different characters While the distinction can be recreated in modern Unicode using combining diacritics modern typographic standards do not recommend doing so In the Hungarian alphabet double acute U U is a distinct letter representing a long U Computing codesCharacter information Preview U uUnicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESISEncodings decimal hex dec hexUnicode 220 U 00DC 252 U 00FCUTF 8 195 156 C3 9C 195 188 C3 BCGB 18030 129 48 137 53 81 30 89 35 168 185 A8 B9Numeric character reference amp 220 wbr amp xDC wbr amp 252 wbr amp xFC wbr Named character reference amp Uuml amp uuml EBCDIC family 252 FC 220 DCISO 8859 1 2 3 4 9 10 14 15 16 220 DC 252 FCCP437 154 9A 129 81Code page 10029 134 86 159 9FGB T 2312 GBK GB 18030 168 185 A8 B9HKSCS 136 162 88 A2Tonal marks for Hanyu Pinyin Character information Preview Ǖ ǖ Ǘ ǘ Ǚ ǚ Ǜ ǜUnicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND MACRON LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND MACRON LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND ACUTE LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND ACUTE LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND CARON LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND CARON LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND GRAVE LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND GRAVEEncodings decimal hex dec hex dec hex dec hex dec hex dec hex dec hex dec hexUnicode 469 U 01D5 470 U 01D6 471 U 01D7 472 U 01D8 473 U 01D9 474 U 01DA 475 U 01DB 476 U 01DCUTF 8 199 149 C7 95 199 150 C7 96 199 151 C7 97 199 152 C7 98 199 153 C7 99 199 154 C7 9A 199 155 C7 9B 199 156 C7 9CGB 18030 129 48 159 57 81 30 9F 39 168 181 A8 B5 129 48 160 48 81 30 A0 30 168 182 A8 B6 129 48 160 49 81 30 A0 31 168 183 A8 B7 129 48 160 50 81 30 A0 32 168 184 A8 B8Numeric character reference amp 469 wbr amp x1D5 wbr amp 470 wbr amp x1D6 wbr amp 471 wbr amp x1D7 wbr amp 472 wbr amp x1D8 wbr amp 473 wbr amp x1D9 wbr amp 474 wbr amp x1DA wbr amp 475 wbr amp x1DB wbr amp 476 wbr amp x1DC wbr GB T 2312 GBK GB 18030 168 181 A8 B5 168 182 A8 B6 168 183 A8 B7 168 184 A8 B8HKSCS 136 124 88 7C 136 125 88 7D 136 126 88 7E 136 161 88 A1Uralic Phonetic Alphabet symbols related to U Character information Preview ᴞUnicode name LATIN SMALL LETTER SIDEWAYS DIAERESIZED UEncodings decimal hexUnicode 7454 U 1D1EUTF 8 225 180 158 E1 B4 9EGB 18030 129 53 215 56 81 35 D7 38Numeric character reference amp 7454 wbr amp x1D1E wbr Keyboarding The methods available for entering U and u from the keyboard depend on the operating system the keyboard layout and the application Microsoft Windows some keyboard layouts feature separate keys for U Using the Swiss French keyboard u can be entered by typing Shift E Using the US International layout u can be entered by typing AltGR Y Microsoft Windows with the Number Lock on hold down the Alt key while typing on the numeric keypad the decimal value of the code point from the active DOS OEM code page without a leading zero then release the Alt key i e Alt 1 5 4 for U and Alt 1 2 9 for u Microsoft Windows with the Number Lock on hold down the Alt key while typing on the numeric keypad the decimal value of the code point from the active ANSI code page with a leading zero then release the Alt key i e Alt 0 2 2 0 for U and Alt 0 2 5 2 for u Microsoft Word for Windows type Ctrl followed by Shift U for U or Ctrl then U for u macOS with an English keyboard layout Australian British or U S type Option U followed by Shift U for U or Option U and then U for u or by keeping the U key pressed and then typing 2 In Linux based operating systems this symbol may be typed by pressing the Compose key followed by u In GTK based GUI Applications Ctrl Shift U followed by the Hex CodeSee alsoUmlaut diacritic Ӱ ӱ Cyrillic letter U with diaeresis Ү ү Cyrillic letter UeReferences About Luk Ptujski Luk 新版护照 吕 姓改拼 LYU 英文无u被替代 Beijing Daily 2012 10 11
