   yu (Ð®&nbsp;Ñ; italics: Ð®&nbsp;Ñ; ) is a letter of the cyrillic script used in east slavic and bulgarian alphabets. in english, yu is commonly romanized as . in turn,  is used, where is available, in transcriptions of english letter  (in open syllables), and also of the  digraph. the sound [], like  in french and  in german, may also be approximated by the letter . ==pronunciation== it is a so-called iotated vowel, pronounced in isolation as , like the pronunciation of  in "youth". after a consonant, no distinct /j/ sound is pronounced, but the consonant is softened. exact pronunciation of the vowel sound of , in russian, depends also on the succeeding sound due to allophony in slavic languages. before a soft consonant it is , the close central rounded vowel â like in 'rude'. if a hard consonant follows , or none, then the result is a back vowel [] â like in 'lewis'. see palatalization#synchronic palatalization for some background. ==history== apart from the form i-o, in early slavonic manuscripts the letter appears also in a mirrored form o-i (). it is this form that is probably the original, precisely displaying the greek combination omicron-iota (Î¿Î¹). at the time that the greek alphabet was adapted to the slavonic language (giving rise to the cyrillic alphabet), this denoted the close front rounded vowel  in educated greek speech. this digraphic representation of  was so basic for speakers of greek that the simple letter upsilon (Ï) representing the same sound came to be called Ï&nbsp;ÏÎ¹Î»ÏÎ½ (y psilon) "simple" Ï in contrast to "complex" Î¿Î¹. note that the close front rounded vowel unlikel
Cyrillic_letters Cyrillic_ligatures Vowel_letters