Ü
Encyclopedia
| Ü | ü |
Ü, or ü, is a character which can be either a letter from several extended Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
s, or the letter U
U
U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
with an umlaut
Umlaut (diacritic)
The diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....
or a diaeresis. When referred to as U-umlaut, it typically represents a close front rounded vowel
Close front rounded vowel
The close front rounded vowel, or high front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is y...
.
Letter Ü
The letter Ü occurs in the HungarianHungarian alphabet
The Hungarian alphabet is an extension of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Hungarian language.One sometimes speaks of the smaller and greater Hungarian alphabets, depending on whether or not the letters Q, W, X, Y are listed, which can only be found in foreign words and traditional...
, Karelian
Karelian language
Karelian language is a Finnic language spoken mainly in the Russian Republic of Karelia. Linguistically Karelian is closely related to the Finnish dialects spoken in eastern Finland and some Finnish linguists even classified Karelian as a dialect of Finnish...
, Turkish
Turkish alphabet
The Turkish alphabet is a Latin alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy...
, Uyghur Latin script
Uyghur Latin Yéziqi
Uyghur Latin script is an auxiliary alphabet for the Uyghur language based on the Latin script. Uyghur is primarily written in a Arabic alphabet and sometimes in a Cyrillic alphabet.- Construction :...
, Estonian
Estonian alphabet
The Estonian alphabet is used for writing the Estonian language and is based on the Latin alphabet, with German influence. As such, the Estonian alphabet has the letters Ä, Ö, and Ü , which represent the vowel sounds , and , respectively...
, Azeri, Turkmen
Turkmen alphabet
The current official Turkmen alphabet as used in Turkmenistan is a Latin alphabet based on the Turkish alphabet, but with notable differences: J is used instead of the Turkish C; Ž is used instead of the Turkish J; Y is used instead of the dotless i ; Ý is used instead of the Turkish consonantal Y;...
, Crimean Tatar and Tatar Latin
Tatar alphabet
Two scripts are currently used for the Tatar language: Cyrillic and Latin.-Introduction:While a Tatar version of the Latin alphabet called Jaŋalif had been in use during the 1930s, there is controversy in the matter of Latin-based Tatar alphabet for İdel-Ural Tatar. One dimension of the...
alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
s, where it represents a close front rounded vowel
Close front rounded vowel
The close front rounded vowel, or high front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is y...
([y]). It is a distinct letter, collated
Collation
Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
separately, and not considered a simple modification of U or Y. It is distinct from "UE".
This same letter appears in the Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
romanization
Romanization
In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...
s pinyin
Pinyin
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
, Wade-Giles
Wade-Giles
Wade–Giles , sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a romanization system for the Mandarin Chinese language. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade during the mid-19th century , and was given completed form with Herbert Giles' Chinese–English dictionary of 1892.Wade–Giles was the most...
, and the German-based Lessing-Othmer
Lessing-Othmer
Lessing-Othmer is a romanisation of Mandarin Chinese that was once used by Germans written by F. Lessing and Dr. W. Othmer, who in 1912 printed their book "Lehrgang der nordchinesischen Umgangssprache" in Qingdao whilst it was a German colony in 1912 through the "Deutsch-Chinesische Druckerei und...
, where it represents the same sound ([y]) e.g. 玉 (jade) or 雨 (rain). Pinyin uses Ü only when ambiguity could arise with similarly romanised words containing a U, whereas Wade-Giles and Lessing use Ü in all situations. As letter "ü" is missing on most keyboards and the sound "v" is not present in standard Mandarin, letter "v" is used on most computer Chinese input methods to enter the words containing "ü". As a result, romanization of Chinese with the letter "v" representing the ü sound can be seen sometimes.
U-umlaut
Umlaut (diacritic)
The diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....
, appears in the German alphabet
German alphabet
The modern German alphabet is an extended Latin alphabet consisting of 30 letters – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet plus four extra letters.In German, the individual letters have neuter gender: das A, das B etc....
. 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
Collation
Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
together with U, or as UE. In languages which 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.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
, U-umlaut is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "ue". Software for optical character recognition
Optical character recognition
Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...
sometimes sees it falsely as ii.
U-diaeresis
Several languages use diaeresis over the letter U to show that the letter is pronounced in its regular way, without dropping out, building diphthongDiphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
s with neighbours etc.
In Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
it is used to distinguish between "gue"/"güe" and "gui"/"güi": antigüedad (antiquity), pingüino (penguin). This is also the case for the Nicaraguan demonym, Nicaragüense. Similarly in Catalan language
Catalan language
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
,
- "gue~güe" are [ɡe]~[ɡwe],
- "gui~güi" are [ɡi]~[ɡwi],
- "que~qüe" [ke]~[kwe],
- "qui~qüi" [ki]~[kwi],
as in aigües, pingüins, qüestió, adeqüi.
Also ü is used to mark that vowel pairs that normally would form a diphthong must be pronounced as separate syllables, examples: Raül, diürn.
In French, the diaeresis appears over the "u" only very rarely in some uncommon words, capharnaüm [-aɔm] ('shambles') Capernaüm
Capernaum
Capernaum was a fishing village in the time of the Hasmoneans. Located on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. It had a population of about 1,500. Archaeological excavations have revealed two ancient synagogues built one over the other...
[-aɔm] or Emmaüs
Emmaus
Emmaus was an ancient town located approximately northwest of present day Jerusalem...
[-ays]. After the 1990 spelling reforms, it is applied to a few more words, like aigüe (formerly aiguë), ambigüe (formerly ambiguë) and argüer [arɡ(ɥ)e] (formerly without accent).
Usage in phonetic alphabets
In the Rheinische DokumentaRheinische Dokumenta
The Rheinische Dokumenta is a phonetic writing system developed in the early 1980s by a working group of academics, linguists, local language experts, and local language speakers of the Rhineland....
, a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German
West Central German
West Central German belongs to the Central, High German dialect family in the German language. Its dialects are thoroughly Franconian including the following sub-families:* Central Franconian...
, the Low Rhenish, and few related vernacular
Vernacular
A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...
languages, "ü" represents a range from a y to a 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: this minute e degenerated to two vertical bars in medieval handwritingHandwriting
Handwriting is a person's particular & individual style of writing with pen or pencil, which contrasts with "Hand" which is an impersonal and formalised writing style in several historical varieties...
s. In most later handwritings these bars in turn nearly became dots.
In modern typography
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
there was insufficient space on typewriter
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
s and later computer keyboard
Computer keyboard
In computing, a keyboard is a typewriter-style keyboard, which uses an arrangement of buttons or keys, to act as mechanical levers or electronic switches...
s 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 encoding
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
s such as ISO 8859-1. As a result there was no way to differentiate between the three different characters. While Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
theoretically provides a solution, this is almost never used.
Computing codes
| character | ||||
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS |
LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS |
||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
220 | 00DC | 252 | 00FC |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks... |
195 156 | C3 9C | 195 188 | C3 BC |
| Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode... |
Ü | Ü | ü | ü |
| Character entity reference Character entity reference In the markup languages SGML, HTML, XHTML and XML, a character entity reference is a reference to a particular kind of named entity that has been predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition . The "replacement text" of the entity consists of a single character from the Universal... |
Ü | ü | ||
| EBCDIC code pages | 252 | FC | 220 | DC |
| DOS/OEM code pages | 154 | 9A | 129 | 81 |
| Windows/ANSI and ISO-8859 code pages | 220 | DC | 252 | FC |
| Macintosh Roman and Central European | 134 | 86 | 159 | 9F |
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#154» for ⟨Ü⟩ and «Alt#129» 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#0220» for ⟨Ü⟩ and «Alt#0252» for ⟨ü⟩
- Microsoft Word for Windows: type «Ctrl+:, Shift+U» for ⟨Ü⟩ or «Ctrl+:, U» for ⟨ü⟩
- Mac OS with an English keyboard layout (Australian, British, or US): type «Option+U, Shift+U» for ⟨Ü⟩ or «Option+U, U» for ⟨ü⟩