Tse (Cyrillic)

Tse (Ц ц; italics: Ц ц or Ц ц; italics: Ц ц), also known as Ce, is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

It commonly represents the voiceless alveolar affricate /t͡s/, similar but not identical to the pronunciation of zz in "pizza" or ts in "cats".

In the standard Iron dialect of Ossetic, it represents the voiceless alveolar sibilant fricative /s/. In other dialects, including Digoron, it has the same value as in Russian.

In English, Tse is commonly romanized as ⟨ts⟩. However, in proper names (personal names, toponyms, etc.) and titles, it may also be rendered as ⟨c⟩ (which signifies the sound in Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian etc.), ⟨z⟩ (which signifies the sound in Italian and German), ⟨cz⟩ (which was one of the conventions to represent the sound in Medieval Latin) or ⟨tz⟩. Its equivalent in the modern Romanian Latin alphabet is ⟨ț⟩.

Tse is thought to have come from the Hebrew letter Tsadi ⟨צ⟩ or the Arabic letter ص, via the Glagolitic letter Tsi (Ⱌ ⱌ). It is unclear what Egyptian hieroglyph originated the letter Tse, possibly derived from an image of a fish hook or a papyrus plant.

The name of Tse in the Early Cyrillic alphabet is ци (tsi). New Church Slavonic and Russian (archaic name) spelling of the name is ⟨цы⟩. In modern Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian, the name of the letter is pronounced [tsɛ] and spelled ⟨цэ⟩ (sometimes ⟨це⟩) in Russian, ⟨це⟩ in Ukrainian, and ⟨цэ⟩ in Belarusian.

In the Cyrillic numeral system, Tse has a value of 900. Tse may also have been derived from Sampi (based on numerical relationship) or Fai (based on shape and numerical relationship).

It is the 24th (if Yo is included) letter of the Russian alphabet. It is used both in native Slavic words (and corresponds to Proto-Indo-European *k in certain positions) and in borrowed words: