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, Uzbek, Quechua, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Ukrainian Latynka and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. Formerly ch was also considered a separate letter for collation purposes in Modern Spanish, Vietnamese, and sometimes in Polish; now the digraph ch in these languages continues to be used, but it is considered as a sequence of letters and sorted as such. 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 [kh]. In post-classical Greek (Koine and Modern) this sound developed into a fricative [x]. Since neither sound was found in native Latin words (with some exceptions like pulcher 'beautiful', where the original sound [k] was influenced by [l] or [r]), in Late Latin the pronunciation [k] occurred. In Old French, a language that had no [kh] or [x] and represented [k] by c, k, or qu, ch began to be used to represent the voiceless palatal plosive [c], which came from [k] in some positions and later became [tʃ] and then [ʃ]. 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 (digraph), nh (digraph), sh (digraph). In Balto-Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic alphabet, ch represents the voiceless velar fricative [x]. Ch is used in the Lithuanian language to represent the "soft h" /x/, in word choras [ˈxɔrɐs̪] "choir". This digraph is not considered a single letter in the Lithuanian alphabet. This digraph is used only in loanwords. "Ch" represents [kh] in Upper Sorbian. In Czech, 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 x) and represents a single entity in Czech collation order, inserted between H and I.