Ch is a digraph in the Latin script. It is treated as a letter of its own in the Chamorro, Old Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Igbo, Uzbek, Quechua, Ladin, 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.
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👉 Ch (digraph) in the context of Transliteration
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus trans- + liter-) in predictable ways, such as Greek ⟨α⟩ → ⟨a⟩ and ⟨χ⟩ → the digraph ⟨ch⟩, Cyrillic ⟨д⟩ → ⟨d⟩, Armenian ⟨ն⟩ → ⟨n⟩ or Latin ⟨æ⟩ → ⟨ae⟩.
For instance, for the Greek term ⟨Ελληνική Δημοκρατία⟩, which is usually translated as 'Hellenic Republic', the usual transliteration into the Latin script (romanization) is ⟨Hellēnikḗ Dēmokratía⟩; and the Russian term ⟨Российская Республика⟩, which is usually translated as 'Russian Republic', can be transliterated either as ⟨Rossiyskaya Respublika⟩ or alternatively as ⟨Rossijskaja Respublika⟩.
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Ch (digraph) in the context of Digraph (orthography)
A digraph (from Ancient Greek δίς (dís) 'double' and γράφω (gráphō) 'to write') or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
Some digraphs represent phonemes that cannot be represented with a single character in the writing system of a language, like ⟨ch⟩ in Spanish chico and ocho. Other digraphs represent phonemes that can also be represented by single characters. A digraph that shares its pronunciation with a single character may be a relic from an earlier period of the language when the digraph had a different pronunciation, or may represent a distinction that is made only in certain dialects, like the English ⟨wh⟩. Some such digraphs are used for purely etymological reasons, like ⟨ph⟩ in French.
Ch (digraph) in the context of Multigraph (orthography)
A multigraph (or pleograph) is a sequence of letters that behaves as a unit and is not the sum of its parts, such as English ⟨ch⟩ (typically pronounced /tʃ/) or French ⟨eau⟩ (pronounced [o]). The term is infrequently used, as the number of letters is usually specified:
Combinations longer than tetragraphs are unusual. The German pentagraph ⟨tzsch⟩ has largely been replaced by ⟨tsch⟩, remaining only in proper names such as ⟨Poenitzsch⟩ or ⟨Fritzsche⟩. Except for doubled trigraphs like German ⟨schsch⟩, hexagraphs are found only in Irish vowels, where the outside letters indicate whether the neighboring consonant is "broad" or "slender". However, these sequences are not predictable. The hexagraph ⟨oidhea⟩, for example, where the ⟨o⟩ and ⟨a⟩ mark the consonants as broad, represents the same sound (approximately the vowel in English write) as the trigraph ⟨adh⟩, and with the same effect on neighboring consonants.