Yu (Cyrillic)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Yu" Cyrillic – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Yu
Ю ю
Ꙕ ꙕ
Usage
Writing system	Cyrillic
Type	Alphabetic
Language of origin	Old Church Slavonic
Sound values	[ju]
In Unicode	U+042E, U+044E, U+A654, U+A655
History
Development	Ο ο and Ι ι Ю ю
Transliterations	Yu yu, Ju ju, I͡U i͡u
Variations	Ꙕ ꙕ
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.

Yu or Ju (Ю ю; italics: Ю ю or Ю ю; italics: Ю ю) is a letter of the Cyrillic script used in East Slavic and Bulgarian alphabets.

In English, Yu is commonly romanized as ⟨yu⟩ or ⟨ju⟩. In turn, ⟨ю⟩ is used, where available, in transcriptions of English letter ⟨u⟩ (in open syllables), and also of the ⟨ew⟩ digraph. The sound [y], like ⟨u⟩ in French and ⟨ü⟩ in German, may also be approximated by the letter ⟨ю⟩.

Sometimes, it is referred to as "Iotated U" because it is a so-called iotated vowel, pronounced in isolation as /ju/, like the pronunciation of ⟨u⟩ in "human". After a consonant, no distinct [j] sound is pronounced, but the consonant is softened. The exact pronunciation of the vowel sound of ⟨ю⟩ in Slavic languages depends also on the succeeding sound. Before a soft consonant, it is [ʉ], the close central rounded vowel, as in 'rude'. Before a hard consonant or at the end of a word, the result is a back vowel [u], as in "pool".

Apart from the form I-O, in early Slavonic manuscripts the letter appears also in a mirrored form O-I (Ꙕ, ꙕ).^[1] As to its origin; one possibility is that it was derived from the omicron-iota (οι) diphthong. At the time that the Greek alphabet was adapted to the Slavonic language, it denoted the close front rounded vowel /y/ in educated Greek speech. The close front rounded vowel does not appear in East Slavic, thus its approximation would have given way to the letters' modern pronunciation.^{[citation needed]}

There is another possible origin to the modern form. By the analogy to several 'iotated' letters Ѥ, Ꙗ, Ѩ and Ѭ; the iotated version of the archaic Cyrillic digraph (or letter) Uk ⟨І-оѵ⟩/⟨І-оу⟩ could have possibly been derived into the modern letter ⟨ю⟩ through the omission of the latter glyph of the trigraphs, similar to how the modern letter У was derived.^[1]

The iotated big Yus ⟨Ѭ⟩ merged itself to ⟨ю⟩ in East Slavic languages.^{[citation needed]}

⟨Ю⟩ is the Voice Quality Symbol for tracheo-œsophageal speech (the symbol attempts to capture iconically the dual nature of the airstream).

• У у : Cyrillic letter U
• Ү ү : Cyrillic letter Ue
• Û û : Latin letter U with circumflex
• Ū ū : Latin letter U with macron
• Ǔ ǔ : Latin letter U with caron

• The dictionary definition of Ю at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of ю at Wiktionary