[fluoridation]

>That's because in English we get it via Spanish

The misconception is that words enter "a language" and not individual people's minds. Most English speakers have never heard the word "axolotl" spoken in its original pronunciation, nor are they familiar with the orthography that spells a "sh" with X.

>Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century).

I don't know about 17th century, but some dialects of Spanish certainly do have that sound now.

>Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?

In English, X at the start of a word is typically pronounced like a Z, as in "Xanadu", "Xanax", and "xylophone". I don't think anyone would bat an eye if you read it as "Zochimilco".

[foldr]

It’s not a misconception that the English word ‘chocolate’ exists and that there’s a particular history of how that came to be the case. I think, reading the thread again, I didn’t make it clear that the sentence you quoted was talking about the history of ‘chocolate’ and not ‘axolotl’.

If pronouncing Xochimilco according to English orthographic conventions is important to you as a matter of principle, then of course you can do it. But it’s a Mexican place name that has a canonical pronunciation that is not difficult for English speakers to approximate, so I can’t really see the point.

(And yes, ʃ does exist in some modern dialects of Spanish, but those aren’t the dialects that would influence the pronunciation of Spanish to English loan words in most cases. The interesting thing is that this was much less obviously the case in the early 1600s. Apparently the exact origin of ‘chocolate’ in Spanish is a bit of a complex historical linguistic puzzle.)

[fluoridation]

>If pronouncing Xochimilco according to English orthographic conventions is important to you as a matter of principle

No, not to me. I speak Spanish natively, but even I don't know how to say that. My first guess would be "Jochimilco", but I'd have to look it up (I'm not going to). I'm just saying that having Xs in weird places would not stop an English speaker from inventing a "wrong" pronunciation on the spot.

>But it’s a Mexican place name that has a canonical pronunciation that is not difficult for English speakers to approximate, so I can’t really see the point.

"Mexico" itself is also not difficult for English speakers to approximate, yet they don't. Clearly approximating the local pronunciation is not how foreign speakers decide how to pay toponyms, and that's fine. That's how languages are shaped.

My point is just that it makes no sense to get hung up on speakers not pronouncing loanwords "correctly". If we're going down this path, we should also complain that Spanish speakers write "fútbol" instead of "football", and that tea is called "tea" instead of "cha" and spelled "荼". We should demand that words be crystallized in their pronunciation and orthography when they cross language barriers.

[foldr]

There aren’t any hard and fast rules about how to pronounce loan words. I agree on that point. In your original post, though, you seemed to be entirely dismissing the option of pronouncing the word according to an English approximation of its native pronunciation, which is an approach that’s equally valid (and is what English speakers often do for quite a few words).

[fluoridation]

>In your original post, though, you seemed to be entirely dismissing the option of pronouncing the word according to an English approximation of its native pronunciation,

When a pronunciation is already widespread, yes. "Axolotl" is not some new word; lots of people know the animal and call it "aksolotl". If we were talking about, say, some obscure Chinese village that suddenly became very relevant in the English-speaking world, I would not insist to pronounce the pinyin spelling of its name as if it was an English word.

[foldr]

Yeah, I actually wasn’t aware that axolotl was an established English word, so I was more in your hypothetical “Chinese village” mindset.

[roryirvine]

The 'sh' pronunciation is pretty well-known, in the UK at least, due to exposure to it in Catalan (particularly with CaixaBank) and Portuguese. I suspect that most people here would guess that Spanish still pronounces it that way too, thanks to México and Xérès / Sherry.

And there's Xitter, of course, which is a fairly common way of referring to the social network formerly known as Twitter.

[fluoridation]

>I suspect that most people here would guess that Spanish still pronounces it that way too, thanks to México and Xérès / Sherry.

Sorry, what? First, is the word "Xérès" well-known among English-speakers? Second, "México" isn't pronounced "méshico", so how is it a supporting argument at all?