Che (Cyrillic)

Form

The letter Che (Ч ч) resembles an upside-down lowercase Latin h, as well as resembling the digit 4, especially in digital or open-ended form. Cursive forms look like lowercase cursive forms of the letter R.

History

The name of Che in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was Чрьвь (črĭvĭ), meaning "worm".

In the Cyrillic numeral system, Che originally did not have a value, however, by the 1300s it started to be used with the numeric value 90 as a replacement for Koppa, some varieties that preserved Koppa around this time used Che with the value 60 instead of the usual letter for it, Ksi. Nowadays, Koppa is not used anymore in any variety, and Che has fully replaced it as the letter with the numeric value 90.

Usage

Slavic languages

Except for Russian and Serbian, all Cyrillic-alphabet Slavic languages use Che to represent the voiceless postalveolar affricate (the ch sound in English).

In Russian, Che usually represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate (like the Mandarin pronunciation of j in pinyin). It is occasionally exceptionally pronounced as:

• the voiceless retroflex affricate (like Mandarin pinyin zh), like in , or
• the voiceless retroflex fricative (like Mandarin pinyin sh), like in .

In Serbian, Che is always pronounced as (Latin: č), as the letter Tshe (Ћ/ћ; Latin: ć), which is unique to Serbian, is always used for the sound. Loanwords using /tʃ/ are typically transliterated to Che rather than Tshe.

In China

The 1955 version of Hanyu pinyin contained the Che for the sound [tɕ] (for which later the letter j was used), 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 (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
• Tx : Digraph Tx, used in Basque and Catalan.
• 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
• Ӌ ӌ : Cyrillic letter Khakassian Che
• Ɥ ɥ : Latin letter turned H
• Վ վ : Armenian letter Vev
• Կ կ : Armenian letter Ken
• Ճ ճ : Armenian letter Che

Computing codes

|0427|name1=Cyrillic Capital Letter Che |0447|name2=Cyrillic Small Letter Che

References

Explanatory footnotes

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

Citations

References

1. (2017-11-17). "Cyrillic number system".
2. "其中ч是取自俄文字母" https://www.douban.com/note/603048605/