Re: digraphs (was: Rhotics)

On Sat, 7 Jul 2007 08:50:20 -0400, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

>> why he then chose to use "ch" for /x/ is less clear:
>
>
>It's not at all unclear, really.  That sound is almost always transcribed as
>"ch" in English transliterations of foreign words, most notably from Hebrew
>(baruch, l'chaim) and Yiddish (chutzpah), and we have of course inherited
>the spelling unchanged from many German names, such as "Bach".
>
>What would you suggest he use instead?  It would never occur to a
>non-linguist Anglophone to read <x> as /x/, only as /ks/ medially and /z/
>initially.  The digraph <kh> would arguably have been better; it is often
>used in the pronunciation guides of American dictionaries for /x/.  But I've
>hardly ever seen it in transliterations.
<kh> is used in Arabic transliteration.  Personally, I use <x> because it's
short and sweet and my audience is mostly conlangers, though in the blog
Vinceon's nonlinguistic (and possibly misheard) pronunciation guides use
<kh>, since the transliteration is presented as something that some
yela'kaja cooked up after researching our writing systems (as well as
probably looking into IPA) and it doesn't really make much sense to Vinceon
(such as <'k> for [kk], which is put in to reflect the Yeltax orthography,
which spells geminate plosives by placing a glottal stop marker before the
plosive syllable).

Reply