Philip Newton wrote:

>On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 11:19:42 +0100, Marco Cimarosti
><marco.cimarosti@...> wrote:
>
>
>>In Latin script, a similar confusion may arise between <m> and <w> and
>>between <n> and <u>, and that's probably why your father borrowed the
>>overscores from his Cyrillic hand.
>>
>>
>
>And indeed, it was formerly common to write a dash or breve over
>handwritten lower-case u's in Germany to distinguish them from n's. (I
>still see it occasionally, but I think the practice is more widespread
>among older people.)
>

A particular feature of the infamous Sütterlin script.

~mark