x

[Jakub Cejka]

On Wed, 28 Aug 1996, Luis Arnold Gonzalez-Reimann wrote:

> No doubt irrelevant, but just for the sake of it: in old Spanish the "X"
> also stood for "Sh".
BTW, if I am not mistaken, the grapheme x represents [sh] also in Gallego
(the language of Galicia in Spain)

But when discussing scholarly transcription (rather than devicing 
convenient spelling system for a language) it is quite usefull to try to 
be at least a bit compatible.  In that sense, that it is better to try to
stick to the commonest meaning of a letter in already established 
transcription and transliteration methods. I do not know any such system 
using x for "sh" for example, while many use x for the guttural 
voiceless fricative. Therefore it's not wise to use x for "sh" while it 
is quite o.k. for the latter as it is intelligible to many others than 
just the concerned person. I use for example one modified ascii code 
for typing (and processing) transcription of Middle East lggs, Indian 
lggs, Caucasian lggs and it is annoying to use two different diacritics 
over g just because what is used for voiced guttural fricative in Turkish 
alfabet can be easily confused with g+"hacek" which is often used 
(instead of j) for the arabic voiced affricate while the sound analogical 
to the mentioned Turkish one is marked differently. So it is much better 
if one transliteration sign means the same in as many systems as 
possible. So I use x invariably for the guttural/velar and it becomes 
confusing if I decide to use it for something different where it is not 
necessary. This is meant just as a request, people, when 
creating/discussing transliteration and/or transcription systems try to 
check what is already established for some other lggs. You never know 
when you'll wish to refer to many lggs at one text ....
      
   Apologies for getting out of topic a bit.


______________________________________________________________________________
Mr. Jakub Cejka
Dept. of Sanskrit, University of Pune
Ganeshkhind, Pune, India  411 007

e-mail:  jakub at unipune.ernet.in   (till July 97 the latest)