Newsgroups: soc.culture.china,soc.culture.taiwan,sci.lang,soc.culture.hongkong,soc.culture.singapore
From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
Subject: Re: How to pronounce Chinese correctly in the Chinese relative NGs.
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Daniel von Brighoff wrote:

> Personally, I think <h> alone would have sufficed.  In most languages, <h>
> before <i> is much closer to the actual Chinese sound ([C], the so-called
> "Ich-Laut" in German) than [S] (which is what less naive speakers
> substitute for <hs>).  <h> is also the etymological spelling in many
> cases.

Admittedly I am not a native speaker of either Chinese or German, but
I definitely learned to pronounce these sounds differently:  German
"Ich-Laut"
is laterally blocked and with the tongue-tip slightly retracted, whereas
Chinese "x" has the tongue-tip curled behind the lower teeth and is
open laterally.  Is this not standard?

-- 
John Cowan						cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban
