Ch (digraph)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ch is a digraph in the Roman alphabet. It is treated as a letter of its own in the Chamorro, Czech, Slovak, Quechua, Welsh, Breton and Belarusian Lacinka alphabets. It is a letter in the Spanish alphabet since 1803. In Vietnamese, it also used to be considered a letter for collation purposes but this is no longer common.
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[edit] Aspirated voiceless velar stop
The Romans used "ch" to transliterate the sound of the Greek letter chi in words borrowed from that language. In classical times, this was pronounced as an aspirated voiceless velar stop. In post-classical times this sound developed into a fricative (see below).
[edit] Voiceless postalveolar fricative
In Portuguese, French, Breton and English words of French origin, "ch" represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ].
[edit] Voiceless postalveolar affricate
In English or Spanish as well as others, "ch" represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate [t͡ʃ].
[edit] Voiceless velar plosive
In Italian, "ch" represents the sound [k] before -i and -e. It also happens in English, regardless of positioncoming mostly from Greek chi.
[edit] Voiceless velar fricative
In the Goidelic languages, several Germanic languages, many Slavic languages, that use the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic alphabet, Welsh and others, "ch" represents the voiceless velar fricative [x]. Additionally, "ch" is frequently used in transliterating into many European languages from Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, and many others.
Breton has evolved a modified form of this digraph, "c'h" for representing [x], as opposed to "ch", which stands for [ʃ]. In Manx, "ch" stands for [x], while [tʃ] is represented by "çh".
[edit] Voiceless palatal fricative
In German, "ch" represents two allophones: the voiceless velar fricative [x] when following back vowels or [a] (the so-called "Ach-laut") and the voiceless palatal fricative [ç] when in initial position or following front vowels (the so-called "Ich-Laut").
[edit] Voiceless palatal plosive
In Vietnamese, "ch" represents the voiceless palatal plosive [c].
[edit] Ch in Czech
[edit] Structure
The letter ch is a digraph consisting of the sequence of Latin alphabet graphemes C and H, however it is a single phoneme (pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative; IPA: [x]) 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 (Chechtal se. He giggled.), while CH or Ch can be used for standalone letter in lists etc.
[edit] Usage
The letter Ch is equal to other letters of the Czech alphabet. It comes between H and I. Thus, the word "chemie" (English: chemistry) comes after "fyzika" (English: physics) in an alphabetical list. Names beginning with Ch are listed in the same way in a phonebook. In a crossword it takes only one square.
[edit] 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 John Huss, so the Ch digraph is the last one left in the modern Czech.
[edit] Alternate representations
In the Czech extension to international Morse code, the letter Ch is '- - - -'
In the Czech extension to Braille the letter Ch is represented as the dot pattern ⠻.
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.
[edit] Ch in pop culture
All principal character created by Roberto Gómez Bolaños for his TV shows have names starting with Ch, including Chompiras, Dr. Chapatin, and perhaps most famously El Chapulín Colorado, a superhero whose costume has a "CH" inscribed by a heart (analogous to the way Superman's costume has an S inscribed on a diamond). Bolaños' artistic name was Chespirito, also with a Ch (Chespir would be a Spanish substandard pronunciation of Shakespeare; suffix -ito means "little").
[edit] See also
| The Latin alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
| history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • ISO 646 • list of letters | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
