Kha (Cyrillic)


Kha or Ha is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It looks the same as the Latin letter X, in both uppercase and lowercase, both roman and italic forms, and was derived from the Greek letter Chi, which also bears a resemblance to both the Latin X and Kha.
It commonly represents the voiceless velar fricative, similar to the pronunciation of in “loch”.
Kha is romanised as for Russian, Ukrainian, and Tajik, and as for Belarusian, while being romanised as for Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Kazakh.

History

The Cyrillic letter Kha was derived from the Greek letter Chi.
The name of Kha in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was .
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Kha had a value of 600.

Usage

Russian

Kha is the twenty-third letter of the Russian alphabet. It represents the consonant unless it is before a palatalizing vowel when it represents.

Ossetian

Kha represents the voiceless uvular fricative in Ossetian. The digraph ⟨хъ⟩ represents the voiceless uvular plosive.

Belarusian

Kha is also an alternative transliteration of the letter خ Ḫāʼ in the Arabic alphabet. This was used in Belarusian Arabic script, corresponding to the above Cyrillic letter.

Related letters and other similar characters