Tzetzes, JOHANNES, a Byzantine author of the later half of the 12th century, known as the author of certain works in prose and verse, which, though excessively dull, and without a vestige of literary genius, are valuable as storehouses of classical information not elsewhere to be had. The principal are (1) Iliaca, consisting of three distinct poems, entitled Ante-Homerica, Homerica, and Post-Homerica (ed. Bekker, 1816; Lehrs, 1840); (2) Biblos Istorike, more commonly called Chiliades, or a collection of more than 600 stories, mythical, legendary, &c. (ed. Kiessling, 1826), written in that worthless sort of verse, called political, which had regard only to syllables, and not to quantity; besides commentaries on Homer, Hesiod, and Aristophanes.

U

is the twenty-first letter in our alphabet. The Semitic alphabet ended with t, which is now followed by the four new letters u, v, w, and y, which have been placed at the end because they are differentiated forms, developed at various periods out of the Semitic letter vau, whose direct descendant is F, which retains its original place as the sixth letter of our alphabet. The letter vau was derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphic picture of the cerastes or horned asp (see ALPHABET), which had the value of f. The two bars of our F represent the horns, and the vertical stroke represents the body of the snake. In Y we have the horns and the body, in U and V the body has disappeared, while W is constructed of four strokes which stand simply for four horns. From the Phœnician symbol, whose form was intermediate between F and Y, the Greeks evolved two characters—one was the Digamma (q.v.), which had a consonantal sound, and was carried to Italy before it fell out of alphabetic use in Greece, and survives as our letter F; the other was a sign called upsilon, which at first resembled our Y, but soon lost the tail, and took the form V, which had the value of u. The form V was carried to Italy, where it represented the sound u as well as that of our w. From V, the lapidary and capital form, the cursive and uncial forms U and u were developed. In the 10th century the capital form V began to be preferred for initials, and the uncial form u for medials, and the consonant being more common at the beginning of Latin words, and the vowel in the middle, the initial form V was gradually appropriated as the symbol for the consonant, and the medial form u as the symbol for the vowel. But the old usage long survived. Thus as late as 1611 v and u were still used in King James's Bible merely as initials and medials, as is shown by such spellings as vnto and haue. In modern English the letter has three principal sounds, the long u, the short u, and the neutral vowel. The long u, heard in the word rude, has the sound of the A.S. ú, which in southern English has usually become a diphthong, represented by ou, as in the words thou, house, mouse, written thú, húis, mús in A.S., or by ow, as in the words how, now, cow, brow, town, written hú, nú, cú, brú, and tún in A.S. In northern English the old sound is frequently retained, cow, house, and town being pronounced coo, hoose, and toon. In the word room (A.S. rúm) and booth (A.S. búth) the spelling has been changed, but the old sound has been preserved. The short A.S. u has in a few cases retained its sound, as in the words full and bullock, but, like the long ú, it has frequently lapsed into the neutral vowel, as in sun and hunger (A.S. sunne and hungor). This sound is now more commonly represented by o, as in son and some, A.S. sunu and sum. Here again the old sound is occasionally retained in northern English, as in come (A.S. cuman), pronounced coom. In French (as in du) and in Welsh u has a narrow sound unknown in English (though common among the lower classes in some parts of Scotland), which is nearly the same as that of the German ü in Müller. The peculiar sound of the u in duke is due to the fact that it is a loan-word from the French duc. The German and Italian u is the long u in brute.