Re: Bear Slayer's Day

On Nov 14, 6:28 am, hol...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Eugene Holman) wrote:
That's because most English speakers lack a word-initial or word-internal
voiceless velar fricative, the sound at the beginning of the Russian
pronunciation of Khrushchev or between the vowels in Chekhov. Some
speakers have this sound word-finally in a few obvious proper names from
other languages, e.g. Bach and Loch Ness, although most people say /bak/
and /lak nes/. Nevertheless, the standard English transliteration from
Russian always has <kh> as the equivalent of <X> and <k> as the equivalent
of <K>.

I can't believe you would claim that "most people say /lak nes/" for
Loch Ness. I am referring to the pronunciation of Loch as /lak/.
Only some Americans do that, not even all, if I am reliably informed.
Canadians don't (the Canadian preservation of short /o/ as short /o/
being one of the major differences between US and Canadian English),
nor do the UK, Australia, NZ, etc. As for non-native English
speakers, I guess it depends who they learnt English from. Even then,
spelling has an influence and from what I can gather most non-native
English speakers say "lock", "top", "shot", etc., except perhaps for a
few US-resident ones.

.

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