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#redirect Ze (Cyrillic)
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Khakas (Khakhas: Хакас тілі) is a Turkic language spoken by the Khakas people, who mainly live in the southern Siberian Khakas Republic, or Khakassia, in Russia. The Khakas number 78,500, of whom 60,168 speak the Khakas language; most people are bilingual in Russian . Its ISO 639-3 code is <code>kjh</code>.
Traditionally, the Khakas language is divided into several closely related dialects, which take their names from the different tribes: Sagay, Kacha, Koybal, Beltir, and Kyzyl. In fact, these names represent former administrative units rather than tribal or linguistic groups. The people speaking all these dialects simply referred to themselves as Tadar (i.e. Tatar). Shor, which was later on recognised as a Khakas dialect, is spoken by people who originally came from Shoria, currently the Kemerovo region.
The first major recordings of the Khakas language originate from the middle of the 19th century. The Finnish linguist Matthias Castrén, who travelled through northern and Central Asia between 1845–1849, wrote a treatise on the Koybal dialect, and recorded an epic. Wilhelm Radloff traveled the southern Siberian region extensively between 1859 and 1870. The result of his research was, among others, published in his four-volume dictionary, and in his ten volume series of Turkic texts. The second volume contains his Khakas materials, which were provided with a German translation. The ninth volume, provided with a Russian translation, was prepared by Radloff's student Katanov, who was a Sagay himself, and contains further Khakas materials.
The Khakas literary language, which was developed only after the Russian Revolution of 1917, is based on the central dialects Sagay and Kacha; the Beltir dialect has largely been assimilated by Sagay, and the Koybal dialect by Kacha.
In 1924, a Cyrillic alphabet was devised, which was substituted by a Latin alphabet in 1929, and replaced by a Cyrillic alphabet again in 1939.
The Khakas language is part of the northeastern conglomerate of Turkic languages, which includes Shor, Chulym, Tuva, Tofa, Sakha (Yakut), and Dolgan.
Che or Cha (Ч, ч, italics: <span style="font-family:serif;">Ч, ч</span>) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. It represents the affricate (very similar to ch in English "change"). In Russian there is a small number of words where che is pronounced as (similar to English to sh in "shape"). Some are stable (что, чтобы), for some there is no agreement (булочная: бу́ло[чн]ая or бу́ло[шн]ая).
It is usually romanised in English as ch, or sometimes as tch, as in French. In linguistics it is transcribed as č. This is Pyotr Chaikovsky's surname (or Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in Russian: Пётр Ильич Чайковский) may be transcribed as Čajkovskij.
Reversed Ze (Majuscule: , Minuscule: ) is a Cyrillic letter used in the Enets and the Khanty languages. The letter is formed from a reversed Cyrillic letter Ze (З). It has a superficial resemblance to the Latin epsilon character, but has different origins. The Reversed Ze was officially added to the Unicode 5.0 Standard, but is still uncommon in most Cyrillic fonts.
Khakassian Che (majuscule:, minuscule:) is a letter of Cyrillic alphabet only now used in Khakas language. It is pronounced for the voiced postalveolar affricate, .
(minuscule: ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet; depending on the context the letter is used, it is based on the numeral 2 or the letter S.
Ƨ was used in the Zhuang language from 1957 to 1986 to indicate the second, or falling, tone (IPA: ), due to its resemblance to the number 2. It is possible that this letter is based on the italic form of the Cyrillic alphabet's ge, as the Zhuang alphabet had also borrowed З and Ч directly from Cyrillic due to their resemblances to 3 and 4. In 1986, Ƨ was replaced by the similarly shaped, but fully Latin, Z, when the alphabet was simplified for use in computers.
As a reversed S, Ƨ was also used as a fractional Roman numeral, where it stood for the fraction 1/72.
The proposed Metelko alphabet, devised by Franc Serafin Metelko, used the letter Ƨ to represent the schwa ə sound; it is unclear what inspiration Metelko used for the character.
In italic type, the Cyrillic alphabet's ge (г) is strongly homoglyphic to the lowercase ƨ.
Reversed S is very often used in the English language as a substitute for S, to simulate a young child's handwriting (see, for instance, the Price is Right pricing game Eaƨy aƨ 1 2 3).
(minuscule: ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet used in the Zhuang language from 1957 to 1986 to indicate the sixth, or mid-level, tone (IPA: ). In 1986, it was replaced by H.
It originates from an alteration of the numeral 6.
(minuscule: ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet used in the Zhuang language from 1957 to 1986 to indicate the fifth, or high-rising, tone (IPA: ). In 1986, it was replaced by Q.
It originates from an alteration of the numeral 5.