Tse (Cyrillic)


Tse, also known as Ce, is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
It commonly represents the voiceless alveolar affricate, like the pronunciation of zz in "pizza".
In the standard Iron dialect of Ossetic, it represents the voiceless alveolar sibilant fricative /s/. In other dialects, including Digoron, it has the same value as in Russian.
In English, Tse is commonly romanized as ts. However, in proper names and titles it may also be rendered as c, z, cz or tz. Its equivalent in the modern Romanian Latin alphabet is ț.

History

Tse is thought to have come from the Hebrew letter Ṣade ⟨צ⟩, via the Glagolitic letter Tsi.
The name of Tse in the Early Cyrillic alphabet is . New Church Slavonic and Russian spelling of the name is цы. In Ukrainian and Belorussian its spelling is tse.
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Tse has a value of 900.

Usage

Russian

It is the 24th letter of the Russian alphabet. It is used both in native Slavic words and in borrowed words:
Unlike most other consonants, never represents a palatalised consonant in Russian. Since /i/ after unpalatalised consonants becomes , the combinations and are pronounced identically: . A notable rule of Russian orthography is that is seldom followed by, with the following exceptions: