Ю, the letter yu

History

Ю is a letter of the Cyrillic script used in the East Slavic and Bulgarian alphabets. In English it is commonly romanized as yu or ju, so the same letter can appear as either in an English-language transcription of a name. The traffic runs the other way as well: where the letter is available, ю is what Russian uses in transcriptions of the English letter u in open syllables and of the digraph ew, and the sound [y], the one written u in French and ü in German, may also be approximated by it.

Russian cursive is the handwritten form of the modern Russian Cyrillic script, used instead of the block letters seen in printed material, and most handwritten Russian, especially in personal letters and schoolwork, uses it. In Russian schools most children are taught from the first grade to write in this script, and unlike Latin handwriting, which ranges from fully cursive to something close to print and where mixed systems are common, it is standard practice to write in Russian cursive almost exclusively. A document written by hand will therefore normally show this letter in its cursive form.

The script has a long descent. Russian cursive was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, the rapid or running chancery hand of the 14th to 17th centuries, which itself came from the earlier Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav. It became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script of books, and modern Cyrillic italic typefaces take their lowercase shapes mostly from the cursive.

Skoropis is harder reading than the hand that followed it. Letter shapes varied with their neighbours, abbreviations and ligatures were many, and each scribe had his own handwriting and his own peculiarities in forming and grouping letters. The practical consequence is that an unclear place has to be compared with parts of the same text that have already been read, a skill acquired mainly from practice.