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Comment by foldr

15 hours ago

They wanted it to be pronounced 'x', so they wrote it 'x': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahuatl_orthography

They can spell/pronounce things differently than we do and it's all cool either way. It's very common for animals to have different spellings, pronunciations, or even completely different names between languages. If you add time and regional axes, the same variances can be true even when keeping with the same language!

  • I'm just explaining why it's written 'x' and pronounced [ʃ]. If it pleases people to knowingly mispronounce Nahuatl loan words, they can do so, but it seems rather silly given that [ʃ] is also in the phonemic inventory of English. What next? Are you going say 'fowks pass' for faux pas?

    • Where I disagree is the premise it's supposed to be mispronunciation to say/spell a word differently than where it came from, doubly so when we change the spellings/pronunciations of our own words!

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