Che (Cyrillic)


Che or Cha is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate, like in "switch".
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" may be transcribed as Chaykovskiy or Čajkovskij.

History

The name of Che in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was , meaning "worm".
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Che had a value of 90.

Usage

Slavic languages

In all Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet, except Russian, Che represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate.
In Russian, Che usually represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate, like the Mandarin pronunciation of j in pinyin. However, in a few words, it is pronounced as, like in лучше.
In Russian, in a few words, it represents : что, чтобы, нарочно.

In China

The 1955 version of Hanyu pinyin contained the Che for the sound , apparently because of its similarity to the Bopomofo letterㄐ.
The Latin Zhuang alphabet used a modified Hindu-Arabic numeral 4, strongly resembling Che, from 1957 to 1986 to represent the fourth tone. In 1986, it was replaced by the Latin letter X.

Related letters and other similar characters