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by thaumasiotes
1740 days ago
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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. |
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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...