[kubanczyk]

Guys, if you omit a letter, omit the "K". Because Harkov or Harkovchanka are close enough to the original pronounciation (Kharkov, Kharkovchanka), while Karkov or Karkovchanka do not even ring a bell.

I've recently discovered that my entire country mispronounces "sheikh", so for now it's my pet peeve of sorts.

[thaumasiotes]

In the case of Russian, the transliteration kh is used because it was developed for rendering Russian words in French, which has no H sound.

For sheikh, I assume, like Achmed, that having the sound in a syllable-final position didn't work for whatever the target language was. It might have been English; we can't do /x/ or syllable-final /h/.

> I've recently discovered that my entire country mispronounces "sheikh", so for now it's my pet peeve of sorts.

If you expect everyone in your country to accurately produce a sound they've never heard, you're in for some disappointment.

[kubanczyk]

> If you expect everyone in your country to accurately produce a sound they've never heard, you're in for some disappointment.

It's Polish and we have all sorts of sounds, this and much worse. The atrocious story is that we even have an earlier Persian-sourced word "szach" which we pronounce sensibly as <<shakh>>. But at some point we've got a duplicate via English, pronounced <<sheik>> (written "szejk"). Ouch...

[mc32]

That transliteration is poor but it’s also poor going into Russian with for example gamburger [гамбургер]. But it’s also no big deal and doesn’t matter because people understand these transliterations.