Ü

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Ü", or "ü", is a glyph which represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, the letter U with umlaut, or a letter U with diaeresis.

1 Letter Ü
2 U-umlaut
3 U diaeresis
4 Typography

[edit] Letter Ü

The letter Ü occurs in the Hungarian, Turkish, Estonian, Azeri, Turkmen, Crimean Tatar and Tatar Latin alphabets, where it represents a close front rounded vowel (/y/).

This same letter appears in the Chinese romanizations pinyin, Wade-Giles, and the German-based Lessing-Othmer, where it represents the same sound: the vowel of 玉 (jade) and 雨 (rain). Pinyin uses Ü only when ambiguity could arise with similarly romanized words containing a U, whereas Wade-Giles and Lessing use Ü in all situations.

[edit] U-umlaut

Image:VolapukAOU.png A similar glyph, U with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of u, which results in the same sound as the letter Ü mentioned in the previous section: /y/. The letter is collated together with U, or as UE. In languages which have adopted German names or spellings, such as Swedish and Dutch, 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.

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".

[edit] U diaeresis

U with diaeresis occurs in several languages that use diaereses.

In Portuguese, Spanish (Castilian) and Catalan, a diaeresis is used to indicate that the u is to be pronounced where it would normally be silent. For example, the Spanish word: vergüenza(shame) is pronounced in Modern Castilian Spanish as Vehr-gwen-tha, while in Latin American Spanish it is pronounced Vehr-gwen-za where the letter makes a W sound.

In these languages, the pronunciation of g when followed by i or e ordinarily changes from /g/ to /x/ (in Castilian) or /ʒ/ (in Portuguese and Catalan), i.e. the same as j. To indicate that the g should be pronounced as /g/ even in those contexts, a silent u is inserted after the g. So guerra (war) is pronounced /gera/, not /xera/, /ʒera/, or /guera/. Placing a diaeresis on the u indicates that it should be pronounced as /w/; hence lingüística (linguistics) is pronounced /lingwistika/, not /lingistika/. It is used similarly in Brazilian Portuguese and Catalan.

In addition, in Catalan qüe and qüi are written when the u must be pronounced as a w, and cue and cui can't be used because the word has a diphthong and not a hiatus. In Catalan the diaeresis can also specify that u is pronounced separately from the preceding vowel and is not combined.

Other languages that use diaereses, such as Dutch, may contain other occurrences of Ü. Since some of these languages also contain U-umlaut, which looks identical to U-diaeresis, words may be inadvertently mispronounced.

[edit] 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: 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 Unicode theoretically provides a solution, this is almost never used.

In Microsoft Windows, one can hold alt while pressing 0220 on the numeric pad as a shortcut to Ü and hold alt while pressing 129 as a shortcut to ü.

The Unicode code point for ü is U+00FC. Ü is U+00DC.

The HTML entity for Ü is Ü. For ü, it is ü (Mnemonic for "U umlaut").

The OSI basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters