![]() Such transliteration often produces unusual letter combinations which confuse Americans or cause them to view the word as completely unpronouncable. It is a product of pedantic transliteration such as is done on passports and in library card catelogues. KH is an attempt to convey a letter sound which most English speakers cannot pronounce anyway. This produces a vibration similiar to that of a Scotish rolled R. KH is pronounced with the it almost touching the hard palate (the ridge of bone inside the row of upper front teeth). The H in hospital is pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching the lower front teeth. I've used Russian as an example here, but the same principles could be employed for other Cyrillic languages, sure. In a strict transliteration, one could make the argument for ch-how the voiceless velar fricative is spelt in the majority of Latin-based languages that use it-or j/x, as in Spanish. It should be h, the closest English equivalent. Lastly, the transliteration of Х as kh, mentioned in your question, is plain tacky.I'd go as far as making it look French, e.g. ![]() The pronunciation of zh is not unambiguous to an English speaker. Their transliteration of Ж as zh also leaves something to be desired. ![]() One shortfall is the fact that they use y to represent three distinct Russian characters (Й, Ы, and Ь), the last of which is not even a letter but a sign that "indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant." Their attempts at doing so have become the standard employed by Western governments. For additional letters, I'd make comparisons with other languages, or simply use what scientific transliterators have decided on.ī) Academics have tried to transliterate Cyrillic languages in such a way that they are easily intelligible to English speakers, using only the basic 26 Latin characters. Since Serbian has a Cyrillic and Latin alphabet, this could be used as a base. It becomes a matter of whether one wants the transliteration to be loyal to the Cyrillic, or easily interpreted by English speakers.Ī) Russian has many of the same Cyrillic characters as Serbian. So, what is the reasoning for this weird combination of consonants and what are the arguments against other reasonable choices that are already used in other English words that have the same phoneme? Trying to pronounce it phonetically results in Klingon-sounding sputtering noise. "kh" seems like the least suitable choice, as it explicitly suggests "k", as in "Khan (Wrath of Khan)". "ch" is also problematic, because in some other words ("technology") it's pronounced as "k" (again in contrast to most other languages that have a version of this widespread Greek-based word that is pronounced with "h", as is the greek letter χ). I assume "h" was not used because people may choose to interpret it as a silent letter. In this case, the pronunciation is very close to the hard "h", as in "hospital", "Hungary", and to "ch" in "loch". In this case, the sensible transliteration would be "h", as it is in the original Cyrillic and in most transliteration for other languages (this is why this English transliteration looks very alien and hard to read compared to slavic languages with latin script, even though the pronunciation is almost the same). I'm not a native english speaker and I'm sometimes baffled by the appearance of "kh" in Russian names and other words (for instance the russian lunar rover "Lunokhod").
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