I also would have said "Sikh" and "seek" are homonyms until recently when I found out that Sikhs' preferred pronunciation is generally to sound closer to "sick" (aspirate the H if you like)
And yet you wanted to correct someone else, without ever having heard someone say it? I moved from California to Louisiana, and while my pronunciation / idioms used to get poked at in good cheer, I never deigned to correct the natives - "its the ten freeway, get it right, I should know, it starts in my state!"
> And yet you wanted to correct someone else, without ever having heard someone say it?
I've heard "Sikh" pronounced many times by native english speakers and that invariably sounds like "seek". Now that I've heard that it's pronounced differently by the Sikhs themselves, I'll aim to use the correct pronunciation. This is an unusual situation in that I am a "native" (i.e. a native of England) and arguably Sikhs are non-native though I'd expect most of them near us were born here.
Also, the English have a long history of turning up in other countries and pushing their own religion/language/culture onto the natives, so maybe I'm just a product of my upbringing?
Also from the UK and have just learnt that I've likely been pronouncing it incorrectly. Here is a video where a Sikh uses the word several times and it sounds like "sick": https://m.youtube.com/shorts/kM1-DUTgTC4
It feels similar to the situation with "Muslim" or "islam", which have a proper "s" sound in Arabic (as in "messy") rather than a "z" sound (as in "music").
I'm going to listen out for how Sikhs pronounce it.