Re: Questions and Impressions of Basque

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> >Interesting to note that, while Spanish transforms 'f'
> >into 'h', Russian transforms 'h' into 'g' (gospital =
> >[military] hospital).
>
> I thought they would rather transform it into [x], since that's what they
> do when trying to learn a language containing [h]...
My understanding is that [x] at some point replaced [g] as the replacement of
foreign [h] in Russian. It appears to be a pretty recent thing; I've seen both
_Gitler_ and _Xitler_* in WWII stuff.

Judging from my atlas, Ukrainian has something spelt transliterated as 'h' where
Russian has 'g' - Chernihiv for Chernigov, and so on. The little voices in my
head say this is probably relevant.

* I'm not sure about how the Russians pronounce the 'i', but I'm hoping for near
cardinal, to maximize the similarity of the initial syllable to Swedish _skit_
[xi:t] "shit (n)"!

                                           Andreas

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