Chi (letter) Chi (letter) Chi (uppercase Χ, lowercase χ; ) is the 22nd letter of the Greek alphabet, pronounced or in English. Its value in Ancient Greek was an aspirated velar stop (in the Western Greek alphabet: /ks/). In Koine Greek and later dialects it became a fricative (/) along with Θ and Φ. In Modern Greek, it has two distinct pronunciations: In front of high or front vowels ( or ) it is pronounced as a voiceless palatal fricative , as in German "ich" or like the "h" in some pronunciations of the English words "hew" and "human". In front of
History of the Greek alphabet depending on their place in the word. Early printers, such as Aldus Manutius and Claude Garamond, attempted to imitate this, basing their printing on the writing of Greek scribes, producing a style text similar to modern italics. As Greece was occupied by the Ottoman Empire until the nineteenth century, early printers of (mostly ancient) Greek were mostly based in western Europe; few were Greek. This led to the adoption of writing conventions for Greek such as letter case influenced by printing and developments in the Latin alphabet. Cursive-inspired Greek print slowly disappeared during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in favour