In English, it isromanized typically as⟨ch⟩ but sometimes as⟨tch⟩, like in French. In German, it can be transcribed as⟨tsch⟩. In Slavic languages using the Latin Alphabet, it is transcribed as⟨č⟩ so "Tchaikovsky" (Чайковский in Russian) may be transcribed asChaykovskiy orČajkovskij.
Handwritten Che in Russian (that rarely resembles r)
The letter Che (Ч ч) resembles an upside-down lowercaseLatin h, as well as resembling the digit4, especially in digital or open-ended form. Cursive forms look like lowercase cursive forms of the letter R.
In theCyrillic 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 forKoppa, 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.[1]
Except for Russian and Serbian, all Cyrillic-alphabet Slavic languages use Che to represent thevoiceless postalveolar affricate/tʃ/ (thech sound inEnglish).
In Serbian, Che is always pronounced as/tʂ/ (Latin:č), as the letterTshe (Ћ/ћ; Latin:ć), which is unique to Serbian, is always used for the/t͡ɕ/ sound. Loanwords using /tʃ/ are typically transliterated to Che rather than Tshe.
The 1955 version ofHanyu pinyin contained the Che for the sound [tɕ] (for which later the letterj was used),[2] apparently because of its similarity to theBopomofo letterㄐ.[citation needed]
The LatinZhuang alphabet used a modifiedHindu-Arabic numeral 4, strongly resembling Che, from 1957 to 1986 to represent the fourth (falling)tone. In 1986, it was replaced by the Latin letterX.
