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 Greek. Since the names of the letters "’āleph" and "hē" were pronounced and by the Greeks, with initial vowels due to the silent gutturals (the disambiguation "e psilon" "narrow e" came later), the acrophonic principle was retained for vowels as well as consonants by using them for the Greek vowel sounds and . Only the letter "‘ayin" for necessitated a change of name ("o", later "o micron"). Phoenician also had an "emphatic" consonant, "ṭēth", which did not exist in Greek. However, Greek had an aspiration distinction that Phoenician lacked, and used ṭēth for the aspirated . The Phoenician consonants "kaph"