Che, Cha or Chu (Ч ч; italics: ''Ч ч'') is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...

. It commonly represents the

voiceless postalveolar affricate The voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant affricate or voiceless domed postalveolar sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The sound is transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with , (formerly ...

, like in "switch" or in "choice". In English, it is romanized most often as but sometimes as , like in French. In German, it can be transcribed as . In linguistics, it is transcribed as so "

Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky , group=n ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. He wrote some of the most popu ...

" (Чайковский in Russian) may be transcribed as ''Chaykovskiy'' or ''Čajkovskij''.

History

The name of Che in the

Early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people living ...

was (''črĭvĭ''), meaning "worm". In the

Cyrillic numeral system Cyrillic numerals are a numeral system derived from the Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the late 10th century. It was used in the First Bulgarian Empire and by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used ...

, Che had a value of 90.

Usage

Slavic languages

In all Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet, except Russian, Che represents the

. In Russian, Che usually represents the

voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate The voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represent this sound are , , and , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are t_s ...

, like the

Mandarin Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to: Language * Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country ** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China ** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...

pronunciation of j in

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese, Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally writte ...

. However, in a few words, it is pronounced as , like in russian: лучше. In Russian, in a few words, it represents (like English in "shape"): russian: что, чтобы, нарочно.

In China

The 1955 version of Hanyu pinyin contained the Che for the sound ɕ(for which later the letter ''j'' was used),"其中ч是取自俄文字母" https://www.douban.com/note/603048605/ apparently because of its similarity to the Bopomofo letterㄐ. The Latin

Zhuang alphabet Standard Zhuang (autonym: , , (pre-1982: ; Sawndip: ); ) is the official standardized form of the Zhuang languages, which are a branch of the Northern Tai languages. Its pronunciation is based on that of the Yongbei Zhuang dialect of Shuangq ...

used a modified Hindu-Arabic numeral 4, strongly resembling Che, from 1957 to 1986 to represent the fourth (falling) tone. In 1986, it was replaced by the Latin letter X.

Related letters and other similar characters

*4 : 4 - Number that very closely resembles Che, especially in digital or open ended form *C c : Latin letter C - the same sound in Malay, Indonesian, Italian *Č č : Latin letter C with caron *Ç ç : Latin letter C with cedilla - an Albanian. Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Turkish, and Turkmen letter *Ĉ ĉ : Latin letter C with circumflex, used in

Esperanto language Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communica ...

*Ch : Digraph Ch *Cs : Digraph Cs *Cz : Digraph Cz *Ҷ ҷ : Cyrillic letter Che with descender *Ӵ ӵ : Cyrillic letter Che with diaeresis *Ҹ ҹ : Cyrillic letter Che with vertical stroke *Ꚇ ꚇ : Cyrillic letter Cche *Ɥ ɥ : Latin letter turned H *Վ վ : Armenian letter Vev *Կ կ : Armenian letter Ken

Computing codes

References

Explanatory footnotes

In some varieties of Western Cyrillic, Ҁ was used for 90, and Ч was used for 60 instead of Ѯ.

Citations

External links

* *{{Wiktionary-inline, ч