Ч, the letter che

History

Ч ч, named che, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /t͡ʃ/, the sound written tch in switch or ch in choice. Russian has a single letter for that affricate, where several languages written in the Latin alphabet need a digraph or a diacritic to record the same sound.

Its passage into Latin script is where the difficulty starts. English usually renders it as ch and sometimes as tch, following French; German can transcribe it as tsch; and the Slavic languages written in the Latin alphabet use č. The surname Чайковский is the standard demonstration, appearing as Chaykovskiy under one system and as Čajkovskij under another. A single Russian name can therefore arrive in a family archive in several spellings that share almost no letters, and the che is usually where they diverge.

Russian cursive, the handwritten form of the modern Russian Cyrillic script, was developed during the 18th century out of skoropis, the rapid or running chancery hand of the 14th to 17th centuries, which had itself grown out of the earlier Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav. It became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script of books, and modern Cyrillic italic typefaces take their lowercase shapes largely from it. Skoropis was the working hand of offices and private office work, marked by abbreviations, ligatures and sweeping pen strokes, and each scribe carried his own peculiarities into it. That is why a doubtful passage is best read by comparing it against the parts of the same document you have already made out.