Che (Cyrillic)
Che or Cha (Ч ч; italics: Ч ч) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /tʃ/, like the pronunciation of ⟨ch⟩ in "change".
In English, Che is usually romanized as ⟨ch⟩, or sometimes as ⟨tch⟩, as in French. In linguistics it is transcribed as ⟨č⟩. Thus Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's surname (Чайковский in Russian) may be transcribed as Chaikovsky or Čajkovskij.
History
The name of Che in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was чрьвь (črvĭ), meaning "worm".
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Che had a value of 90.
Usage
Slavic languages
In all Slavic languages which use Cyrillic, except Russian, Che represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /tʃ/.
Russian
In Russian, Che usually represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate /t͡ɕ/. There is a small number of words where it represents /ʂ/ (similar to English to ⟨sh⟩ /ʃ/ in "shape"); e.g. что, чтобы, бýлочная.
Zhuang
Che was used in the Latin Zhuang alphabet from 1957 to 1986 to represent the fourth (falling) tone, because of its similarity to the numeral 4. In 1986, it was replaced by the Latin letter X.
Related letters and other similar characters
- Ç ç : Latin letter C with cedilla
- 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
Computing codes
character | Ч | ч | ||
Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER CHE | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER CHE | ||
character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
Unicode | 1063 | 0427 | 1095 | 0447 |
UTF-8 | 208 167 | D0 A7 | 209 135 | D1 87 |
Numeric character reference | Ч | Ч | ч | ч |
KOI8-R and KOI8-U | 254 | FE | 222 | DE |
Code page 855 | 252 | FC | 251 | FB |
Code page 866 | 151 | 97 | 231 | E7 |
Windows-1251 | 215 | D7 | 247 | F7 |
ISO-8859-5 | 199 | C7 | 231 | E7 |
Macintosh Cyrillic | 151 | 97 | 247 | F7 |