U, the German Kurrent letter u

History

The letter U occupies the 21st position in the German alphabet. Phonetically, it represents a back close rounded vowel, realized as long /uː/ in 'gut' and short /ʊ/ in 'Mutter'.

Lowercase u in Kurrent consists of two vertical downstrokes joined at the bottom, identical in baseline ductus to the letter n. To prevent catastrophic reading errors, German scribal tradition developed the mandatory rule that lowercase u MUST carry a curved diacritic or arc (the U-Bogen) floating directly above it. Capital U is a wide open bowl with an entry flourish and exit curve.

The U-Bogen is perhaps the single most famous feature of German handwriting. Because e, n, and u share similar vertical strokes, spotting the floating crescent above u immediately allows the reader to anchor surrounding letters in seventeenth- to twentieth-century manuscripts.

The bar or hook that many Germans still write over a small u comes from Kurrent, where it told u from the otherwise identical n. When the Latin cursive, with its differently shaped n, took over in the mid-nineteenth century, many writers kept the marked u anyway.^[1]