Tse (Cyrillic)

This article is about Cyrillic letter. For other uses, see Tse (disambiguation).

Tse (Ц ц; italics: Ц ц) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

It commonly represents the voiceless alveolar affricate /ts/, like the pronunciation of ⟨zz⟩ in "pizza".

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 Serbian, Czech, Hungarian etc.), ⟨z⟩ (which signifies the sound in Italian and German), ⟨cz⟩ or ⟨tz⟩.

History

Tse is thought to have come from the Phoenician letter Ṣade ⟨𐤑⟩, via the Glagolitic letter Tsi ⟨Ⱌ⟩.

The name of Tse in the Early Cyrillic alphabet is ци (tsi). New Church Slavonic and Russian spelling of the name is цы.

In the Cyrillic numeral system, Tse has a value of 900.

Usage

Russian

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

• as a match for the Latin ⟨c⟩ in words of Latin origin, for example цирк (circus), центр (center),
• for the German ⟨z⟩ and ⟨tz⟩ in words borrowed from German, for example цинк (Zink), плац (Platz),
• ⟨ци⟩ may correspond to Latin ⟨ti⟩ (before vowels), for example сцинтилляция (scintillation).

Russian words starting with ⟨ц⟩, such as царь (tsar), are rare, and very few of them are of Slavic origin (the example is usually explained as derived from Latin caesar).

Unlike most other consonants (but like ⟨ж⟩ and ⟨ш⟩), ⟨ц⟩ never represents a palatalized consonant in Russian (except occasionally in foreign proper names with ⟨ця⟩ or ⟨цю⟩). Since /i/ after unpalatalized consonants becomes [ɨ], the combinations ⟨ци⟩ and ⟨цы⟩ are pronounced identically: [tsɨ]. A notable rule of Russian orthography is that ⟨ц⟩ is seldom followed by ⟨ы⟩, with the following exceptions:

• the ending -⟨ы⟩ of the plural number or of Genitive case (птица nom. sg. → птицы nom. pl. or gen. sg.),
• possessive suffix -⟨ин⟩ is spelled -⟨ын⟩ after ⟨ц⟩ and only in this case: троицын, курицын,
  • the suffix is very popular in Russian last names, but the spelling varies and both -⟨цын⟩ and -⟨цин⟩ are possible, Ельцин is an example,
• the ending of adjectives -⟨ый⟩ (that becomes -⟨ые⟩, -⟨ым⟩, -⟨ыми⟩, -⟨ых⟩ in declension), for example куцый or бледнолицый,
• conjugation of a vulgar verb сцать (сцы, сцым, сцыт, сцыте, сцышь) and its prefixed derivatives,
• only a few word roots contain ⟨цы⟩ now: цыган, цык- (цыкать, цыкнуть), цып- (цыплёнок, цыпки, цыпочки, цып-цып), цыц,
  • pre-1956 lists contain words such as цыбик, цыбуля, цыгарка, цыдулка, цыкля, цымбалы, цымес, цынга, цыновка, цынубель, цырюльня, цытварный, цыфирь, панцырь etc. (examples are taken from Ya. S. Khomutov's spelling dictionary, 1927; now all these words are spelled with -ци-),
• Pinyin's ⟨ci⟩ becomes ⟨цы⟩, and ⟨qi⟩ becomes ⟨ци⟩.

Related letters and other similar characters

• צ : Hebrew letter Tsadi
• C c : Latin letter C

Computing codes

Character	Ц		ц
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER TSE		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER TSE
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	1062	U+0426	1094	U+0446
UTF-8	208 166	D0 A6	209 134	D1 86
Numeric character reference	Ц	Ц	ц	ц
KOI8-R and KOI8-U	227	E3	195	C3
Code page 855	165	A5	164	A4
Code page 866	150	96	230	E6
Windows-1251	214	D6	246	F6
ISO-8859-5	198	C6	230	E6
Macintosh Cyrillic	150	96	246	F6

External links

• The dictionary definition of Ц at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of ц at Wiktionary