Ch (digraph)
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.
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).
Voiceless postalveolar fricative
In Portuguese, French, Breton and English words of French origin, "ch" represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ].
Voiceless postalveolar affricate
In English or Spanish as well as others, "ch" represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate [t͡ʃ].
Voiceless velar plosive
In Italian, "ch" represents the sound [k] before -i and -e. It also happens in English, regardless of position, in words coming from Greek, mainly from chi.
Voiceless velar fricative
In several Gaelic languages, several Germanic languages, many Slavic languages (including Czech), 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 and Manx have evolved modified forms of this digraph for representing [x], as opposed to [ʃ] or [tʃ]. In Breton, [x] is represented by "c'h", and in Manx by "çh".
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").
Ch in 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 (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.
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.
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.
Ch in pop culture
All principal character created by Roberto Gómez Bolaños for his TV shows have names starting with Ch. For example: 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).