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 alphabet the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an , gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet which in turn developed into the Old Roman alphabet. In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic (which used both Greek and Roman letters), and perhaps Georgian. Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, the Manchu alphabet, descended from the abjads of