Talk:Kha (Cyrillic)

H in "human"

This doesn't seem like a good example to me (not that I can think of any good English-language examples). To me human has a similar H sound to hat, but slightly closer to a silent H.

What if we said like the ch in "Bach", or Scottish "loch"? —Michael Z. 2005-03-7 17:06 Z

The consonant h in Mandarin Chinese is actually /x/, but it doesn't help if one doesn't know Chinese. This is the same case for me who doesn't know any about German or Scottish. --Hello World! 07:31, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Х (Kha) in English

As this sound is missing in English, words containing digraph kh are often pronounced as /k/ in English, which does not render the correct original pronunciation, e.g. Kharkiv or Kharkov (Russian: Харьков, Ukrainian: Харкiв) or Nikita Khrushchov (or Khrushchev) (Никита Хрущёв), pronouncing /h/ would be closer to the original /x/.

Aeusoes1, you have removed this block with this smells of POV OR; why is English mispronunciation special? in the subject. Please clarify your concern, happy to review. To me it seems important and of interest. Happy to rephrase to avoid any bad smell.

• Because of the mispronunciation, some people prefer to transliterate Russian "Х" as English H, h, /x/ and /k/ are much more different to the Russian ear.
• I think it's important to mention to readers that Russian Х does not represent /k/, have a number of Anglophones pronouncing "kh" as /h/ as in Scottish 'loch". I am not saying that saying /k/ is wrong but /x/ is more accurate if they want to sound closer to the original.
• Real examples known to English speakers are important, in my opinion, Хрущёв is the hardest example (consonant cluster), I added Харьков/Харкiв.
• Looking at some pages, e.g. Johann Sebastian Bach, it seems that /x/ is no so foreign to English-speakers, after all.

--Atitarev (talk) 05:43, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I probably should have started this discussion myself or reformulated it in a less POV way.

• First, one could argue that the pronunciation of /k/ isn't because /x/ is missing but because it's transliterated as kh and there's not tradition of pronouncing kh as /h/ in English. We can probably extend the /x/ > /k/ claim to other languages that don't have /x/.
• Second, saying "X is wrong and Y is more accurate" especially in this context seems overly prescriptivist and subject to one's personal opinion. If you can find a scholarly (linguistic?) source that argues, for example, that /x/ and /h/ are acoustically or perceptively similar then that might back this up, though that might qualify as WP:SYNTH.
• I agree that examples would be good. I agree that Хрущёв is a horrible example if you're trying to illustrate that /h/ is a better rendering (since /hr/ is not an acceptable cluster in English).
• /x/ is used in some English dialects as well as by pedantic folks who like to pronounce German names with /x/ and French names with the uvular r. Not so sure if it's common outside of that. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 06:58, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Why "kh" and not "h"?

Why is it usually transliterated as "kh" and not as "h"? It sounds like "h" in most words, it is transliterated as "h" in all the Slavic languages with roman alphabet and, to make things worse, "kh" is usually pronounced as "k", which sounds much different. So in "kh", this "k" part seems like superfluous silent letter which can only confuse the reader and make the words look more complicated.

So why is it there? Are there any sources explaining that? If yes, that would be valuable information to add to this article. --94.253.158.130 (talk) 08:45, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Why not X?

Letter X is [iks] 178.205.243.195 (talk) 06:34, 4 November 2022 (UTC)