Tshe (Ћ ћ; italics: Ћ ћ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script, used only in the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, where it represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate /tɕ/, somewhat like the pronunciation of ⟨ch⟩ in "chew"; however, it must not be confused with the voiceless postalveolar affricate Che (Ч ч), which sounds /tʃ/ and which also exists in Serbian Cyrillic script. The sound of Tshe is produced from the voiceless alveolar plosive /t/ by iotation. Tshe is the 23rd letter in the Serbian alphabet. It was first used by Dositej Obradović as a revival of the old Cyrillic letter Djerv (Ꙉ), and was later adopted in the 1818 Serbian dictionary of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić.[1][2] The equivalent character to Tshe in Gaj's Latin alphabet is Ć.[3]
Being part of the most common Serbian last names, the transliteration of Tshe to the Latin alphabet is very important; however, there are many ways to transliterate it. It is typically transliterated as ⟨ć⟩, as per the Serbo-Croatian Latin alphabet or, without the diacritic, as ⟨c⟩; less frequent transliterations are ⟨tj⟩, ⟨ty⟩, ⟨cj⟩, ⟨cy⟩, ⟨ch⟩ (also used for Che), and ⟨tch⟩, ⟨ts⟩ (the last one in Hungarian only, but ⟨cs⟩ and ⟨ty⟩ are more common).
As it is one of the letters unique to the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, and also the letter with which Serbian word for Cyrillic (ћирилица) starts, Tshe is often used as the basis for logos for various groups involved with the Cyrillic alphabet.[citation needed]
Related letters and other similar characters
Computing codes
References
- ↑ Maretić, Tomislav. Gramatika i stilistika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga književnog jezika. 1899.
- ↑ George L Campbell and Christopher Moseley, The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013, ISBN 1135222967, p. 85.
- ↑ Duško Vitas et al., The Serbian Language in the Digital Age, Springer, 2012, ISBN 3642307558, p. 53..
External links
The dictionary definition of Ћ at Wiktionary- The dictionary definition of ћ at Wiktionary
