vessel, with a cross-shaped chi
Pronunciation Ancient Greek Its value in
Ancient Greek was originally an aspirated
velar stop (in the
Western Greek alphabet: /ks/). It later became a
fricative (/) along with
Θ and
Φ.
Modern Greek In
Modern Greek, it has two distinct pronunciations: In front of
high or
front vowels ( or ) it is pronounced as a
voiceless palatal fricative , which sounds similar to
"h" in English words like
hew and
human and is equivalent to the German
ich-Laut as in
dich. In front of
low or
back vowels (, or ) and
consonants, it is pronounced as a
voiceless velar fricative (), like the German
ach-Laut as in
Bach or the
Spanish j.
Transliteration Chi is
romanized as in most systematic transliteration conventions, but sometimes is used. In addition, in Modern Greek, it is often also romanized as or in informal practice.
Greek numeral In the system of
Greek numerals, it has a value of 600.
Xi In ancient times, some
local forms of the
Greek alphabet used the chi instead of
xi to represent the /ks/ sound. This was borrowed into the early
Latin language, which led to the use of the letter
X for the same sound in Latin, and many modern languages that use the
Latin alphabet. ==Cyrillic==