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by jcahill 1449 days ago
I didn't downvote you. There are only so many phonologically near-optimal patterns to recycle into things that sound kinda-sorta like words, so you're bound to run into these things. You just pick your poison and hope that you don't end up being shipwrecked by a gale-force meme like "fedora" as a pejorative with time.

fwiw, the concern you're thinking of tends to be sidestepped either by a pseudo-initialism or a vowel shift in actual practice. In this case, the first options / paths of least resistance in an arabic-speaking community would seemingly be:

- to raise the first vowel to more of an [ɪə]¹ or

- to pronounce the /kəf/ - /kɑf/ then "IR" as single letters.

¹ which afaik would turn it into a long vowel that might act like a geminate? dunno