Ŭ: Encyclopedia II - Ŭ - Esperanto

Ŭ - Esperanto

Ŭ also represents a semivowel in Esperanto orthography, which was devised in the late 19th century. As in Belarusian, Esperanto Ŭ is pronounced as a non-syllabic close back vowel, in the diphthongs aŭ, eŭ, and is represented by [u̯] in the IPA.

A common hypothesis is that the Esperanto letter was derived from Belarusian, which can be inferred from these observations:

• Belarusian is the only natural language whose orthography contains this letter.
• The letter has the same pronunciation in the two languages.
• Esperanto's creator, Ludwik Zamenhof, was born in Białystok in the vicinity of Belarus.
• There is evidence that Zamenhof referred also to his native dialect when constructing Esperanto.

However, Zamenhof first used the Ŭ in 1887 in the Unua Libro, whereas the first attested use of Ŭ in Belarusian was in 1891 in a poetry collection by Francišak Benedykt Bahuševič. While it is possible that Ŭ was already in use in Belarusian before Bahuševič's poetry collection, another possibility is that the letter was borrowed into Łacinka from Esperanto, rather than the other way around. It is of course equally likely that the Ŭ developed independently in both Esperanto and Belarusian.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Esperanto", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki