Х, the letter ha

History

Х х, named kha and also called khe, xe, he or ha, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiceless velar fricative /x/, close to the hard ch that some Scottish speakers use in the word loch, though the letter has different pronunciations in different languages. It was derived from the Greek letter chi, which bears a resemblance to the Latin X and to kha alike. Romanisation follows the source language: kh for Russian, Ukrainian, Mongolian and Tajik, ch for Belarusian and Polish, h for Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Kazakh, and j for Spanish.

For a reader working through a document, the shape is more of an obstacle than the sound. Kha looks the same as the Latin letter X in both uppercase and lowercase, and in both roman and italic forms. In Russian cursive the lowercase letter is sometimes written identical to the block lowercase Latin x, so the form on the page does not by itself say which alphabet the writer was using. The word around it has to settle that.

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.