| Mu (letter) |
Article Index for Mu |
Information AboutMu (letter) |
For other uses, see Mu . The word ''mu'' (pronounced / Mju / Mu was derived from the Egyptian Hieroglyph ic symbol for water () which had been simplified by the Phoenician s and named after their word for water, ''mem''. The sound "M" is still connected with the sea in many languages, as in Hebrew ''ma'im'', Latin ''mare'', Portuguese ''mar'', German ''Meer'', and French ''mer''. The letter mu appears in conjunction with Alpha and Omega to signify the "beginning, middle (''meson'') and end," a phrase found in an Orphic verse describing Zeus , and later adopted to describe both Jehovah and Jesus. In Aeschylus ' '' Eumenides '', the repeated moaning of the letter mu is the sound made by the sleeping Furies as the ghost of Clytemnestra begins to invoke them. It again appears as an ominous mantra in a 10th Century Coptic papyrus, containing a Christian curse against Perjurer s that invokes the angel Temeluchos: I adjure you by the seven perfect letters, ΜΜΜΜΜΜΜ. You must appear to him, you must appear to him. I adjure you by the seven angels around the throne of the father. ACADEMIA The lower-case letter mu is used as a special symbol in many Academic Field s. The upper case Mu isn't generally used in this way because it is normally indistinguishable from the latin M.
Rarely, the letter μ may be used to distinguish one item represented by "m" from another (but a better option might be to use "''m''", "m", "''m''", etc.). Letters that arose from the Greek Μ include the Latin M and Cyrillic М . COMPUTING In Unicode, the upper and lower case Mu are encoded at 039C and U+03BC respectively. In ISO 8859-7 they are encoded at CC HEX and ECHEX. The micro sign is considered a distinct character by Unicode for historical reasons and is found at U+00B5 as well as position B5HEX in ISO 8859 - 1 , 3 , 8 , 9 , 13 and 15 . ISO-8859-5 also has a character that looks somewhat like lower case Mu at E6HEX but this is actually supposed to be the Cyrillic Small Letter Tse . POP CULTURE Mike Paradinas , a British electronic musician, uses the letter in his stage name µ-ziq (pronounced ''music''). REFERENCES
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