Ch (digraph)
Ch is a digraph in the Latin script. It is treated as a letter of its own in Chamorro, Old Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Igbo, Kazakh, Uzbek, Quechua, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. In Vietnamese and Modern Spanish, it also used to be considered a letter for collation purposes but this is no longer common.
History
The digraph was first used in Latin since the 2nd century B.C. to transliterate the sound of the Greek letter chi in words borrowed from that language. In classical times, Greeks pronounced this as an aspirated voiceless velar plosive. In post-classical Greek this sound developed into a fricative. Since neither sound was found in native Latin words, in Late Latin the pronunciation occurred.In Old French, a language that had no or and represented by c, k, or qu, ch began to be used to represent the voiceless palatal plosive, which came from in some positions and later became and then. Now the digraph ch is used for all the aforementioned sounds, as shown below. The Old French usage of ch was also a model of several other digraphs for palatals or postalveolars: lh, nh, sh.
Voiceless velar fricative
In the Goidelic languages, several Germanic, and Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic alphabet, and others, ch represents the voiceless velar fricative. Additionally, "ch" is frequently used in transliterating into many European languages from Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, and various others.Breton has evolved a modified form of this digraph, c'h for representing, as opposed to ch, which stands for. In Manx, "ch" stands for, while is represented by çh.
In Rheinische Dokumenta, ch represents, as opposed to ch, which stands for.
Voiceless uvular fricative
In Welsh, it represents the voiceless uvular fricative.English
In English, ch is most commonly pronounced as, as in chalk, cheese, cherry, church, much, etc.Ch can also be pronounced as, as in ache, choir, school and stomach. Most words with this pronunciation of ch find their origin in Greek words with the letter chi, like mechanics, chemistry and character. Others, like chiaroscuro, scherzo and zucchini, come from Italian.
In English words of French origin, "ch" represents, as in charade, machine, and nonchalant. Due to hypercorrection, this pronunciation also occurs in a few loanwords from other sources, like and .
In certain dialects of British English ch is often pronounced in two words: ' and ', and also in place names, such as Greenwich and Norwich.
In words of Scots origin it may be pronounced as , as in loch and clachan. In words of Hebrew or Yiddish origin it may be pronounced as , as in challah.
The digraph can also be silent, as in Crichton, ', ', yacht and traditionally in .
Braille
In English Braille, the "ch" digraph, when pronounced as, is represented by a single cell:Breton
In Breton ch represents the.This digraph should not be confused with c'h.
Catalan
In Catalan ch represents final sound. In the past it was widely used, but nowadays it is only used in some surnames. In medieval Catalan it was occasionally used to represent sound.Chamorro
Ch is the fifth letter of the Chamorro language and its sound is.The Chamorro Language has three different dialects - the Guamanian dialect, the Northern Mariana Islands dialect, and the Rotanese dialect. With the minor difference in dialect, the Guamanians have a different orthography from the other two dialects. In Guamanian orthography, both letters tend to get capitalized. The Northern Mariana Islands' & Rotanese orthography enforces the standard capitalization rule.
Chinese
In Mandarin Chinese ch is used in Pinyin to represent an aspirated voiceless retroflex affricate.Czech
Structure
The letter ch is a digraph consisting of the sequence of Latin alphabet graphemes C and H, however it is a single phoneme and represents a single entity in Czech collation order, inserted between H and I. In capitalized form, Ch is used at the beginning of a sentence, while CH or Ch can be used for standalone letter in lists etc. and only fully capitalized CH is used when the letter is a part of an abbreviation and in all-uppercase texts.Usage
In Czech alphabet, the digraph Ch is handled as a letter equal to other letters. In Czech dictionaries, indexes, and other alphabetical lists, it has its own section, following that of words beginning with H and preceding that of words that begin with I. Thus, the word chemie will not be found in the C section of a Czech dictionary, nor the name Chalupa in the C section of the phonebook. The alphabetical order h ch is observed also when the combination ch occurs in median or final position: Praha precedes Prachatice, hod precedes hoch.History
In the 15th century, the Czech language used to contain many digraphs like modern Polish does but most of them were replaced by single letters with diacritic marks by the reform of Jan Hus. Besides ch, there is only one digraph used in the Czech language - dž, representing voiced postalveolar affricate. However, ch is the only Czech digraph which is treated as a single letter while dž is used in translating a foreign word into Czech.Dutch
ch was originally voiceless, while g was voiced. In the northern Netherlands, both ch and g are voiceless, while in the southern Netherlands and Flanders the voiceless/voiced distinction is upheld. The voiceless fricative is pronounced or in the north and in the south, while the voiced fricative is pronounced in the north and in the south. This difference of pronunciation is called 'hard and soft g'.French
In native French words, ch represents as in chanson.In most words of Greek origin, it represents as in archéologie, chœur, chirographier; but chimie, chirurgie, and chimère have, as does anarchiste.
German
In German, ch normally represents two allophones: the voiceless velar fricative following a, o or u, and the voiceless palatal fricative following any other vowel or a consonant. A similar allophonic variation is thought to have existed in Old English.The sequence "chs" is normally pronounced, as in sechs and Fuchs.
An initial "ch" may be pronounced , or . It is always pronounced when followed by l or r, as in Christus or Chlor.
The Rheinische Dokumenta writing system uses ch, for the voiceless palatal fricative, while ch represents.
Hungarian
The digraph ch is not properly speaking part of the Hungarian alphabet, but it has historically been used for , as in English and Spanish, and is found in a few words of Greek or other foreign origin, such as technik, where it is pronounced the same as h, somewhat as in Polish.Interlingua
In Interlingua, ch is pronounced /ʃ/ in words of French origin, /k/ in words of Greek and Italian origin, and more rarely /t͡ʃ/ in words of English or Spanish origin. Ch may be pronounced either /t͡ʃ/ or /ʃ/ depending on the speaker in many cases.Irish
In Irish, ch stands for when broad and when slender. Examples: broad in chara "friend", loch "lake, lough", boichte "poorer"; slender in Chéadaoin "Wednesday", deich "ten".Italian
In Italian, ch represents the voiceless velar plosive before -e and -i.Kazakh
Ch was selected to represent in the Kazakh Latin alphabet. It was considered a separate letter, and was the 32nd and last letter of the alphabet in the 2018 amendment.As part of the switch of Kazakh from Cyrillic to Latin, the initial proposed Latin alphabet in 2017 tried to avoid the use of accent marks and digraphs in representing certain phonemes. Initially, /t͡ɕ/ would have been represented by ⟨C'⟩. This was revised by Presidential Decree 637 of 19 February 2018, replacing the apostrophe with the diagraph ⟨Ch⟩.
However, in the later 2019, under president Tokayev's amendment suggestions, the Ch has replaced by Ç in order to keep compatibility with other Turkic languages.
Latin
The Romans used ch to transliterate the sound of the Greek letter chi in words borrowed from that language. In classical times, Greeks pronounced this as an aspirated voiceless velar plosive. In post-classical Greek this sound developed into a fricative.Lithuanian
Ch is used in the Lithuanian language to represent the "soft h", in word choras "choir". This digraph is not considered a single letter in the Lithuanian alphabet. This digraph is used only in loanwords.Massachusett
Ch was used in the Massachusett orthography developed by John Eliot to represent a sound similar to and in the modern orthography in use by some Wampanoag tribes for the same sound. In both systems, the digraph ch is considered a single letter.Nguni languages
In Xhosa and Zulu, ch represents the voiceless aspirated velar dental click.Occitan
In Occitan, ch represents, but in some dialects it is.Ossetic
In the Ossetic Latin alphabet, ch was used to write the sound .Palauan
In Palauan, ch represents a glottal stop.Polish
Ch has been used in the Polish language to represent the "soft h" as it is pronounced in the Polish word :wikt:chleb#Polish|chleb "bread", and the h to represent "hard h", where it is distinct, as it is pronounced in the Polish word :wikt:hak#Polish|hak "hook". Between World War I and World War II, the Polish intelligentsia used to exaggerate the "hardness" of the hard Polish h to aid themselves in proper spelling. In most present-day Polish dialects, however, ch and h are uniformly collapsed as.Portuguese
In Portuguese, ch represents.Spanish
ch is pronounced as a voiceless postalveolar affricate in both Castillian and Hispanic American, or a voiceless postalveolar fricative in Andalusian.Ch is traditionally considered a distinct letter of the Spanish alphabet, called che. In the 2010 Orthography of the Spanish Language, Ch is no longer considered a letter of its own but rather a diagraph consisting of two letters.
Until 1994 ch was treated as a single letter in Spanish collation order, inserted between C and D; in this way, mancha was after manco and before manda. However, an April 1994 vote in the 10th Congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies adopted the standard international collation rules, so ch is now considered a sequence of two distinct characters, and dictionaries now place words starting with ch- between those starting with cg- and ci-. Similarly, mancha now precedes manco in alphabetical order.
Slovak
In Slovak, ch represents, and more specifically in voiced position. At the beginning of a sentence it is used in two different variants: CH or Ch. It can be followed by a consonant, a vowel or diphthong.Only few Slovak words treat CH as two separate letters, e.g., viachlasný, from viac and hlas.
In the Slovak alphabet, it comes between H and I.
Swedish
In Swedish, ch represents /ɧ/ and /ɕ/ in loanwords such as choklad and check. These sounds come from former and , respectively. In the conjunction och, ch is pronounced or silent.Upper Sorbian
"Ch" represents in Upper Sorbian.Uyghur
Ch represents in Uyghur Latin script.Uzbek
Ch represents in the Uzbek alphabet. It is considered a separate letter, and is the 28th letter of the alphabet.Vietnamese
In Vietnamese, ch represents the voiceless palatal plosive in the initial position. In the final position, the pronunciation is identical to the final -k:.Welsh
In Welsh ch represents the voiceless uvular fricative. The digraph counts as a separate letter in the Welsh alphabet, positioned after c and before d; so, for example, chwilen 'beetle' comes after cymryd 'take' in Welsh dictionaries; similarly, Tachwedd 'November' comes after taclus 'tidy'.Alternate representations
provides a unitary code for Ch used in several non-English languages, namely — — — —.In the Czech extension to Braille the letter Ch is represented as the dot pattern ⠻. English literary braille also has a single cell dedicated to , which stands for "child" in isolation, but this is considered a single-cell contraction rather than a separate letter.
In computing, Ch is represented as a sequence of C and H, not as a single character; only the historical KOI-8 ČS2 encoding contained Ch as a single character.