zompist bboard

If one proper name is enough to count as a distinct pronunciation for the letter "x," then there are definitely more than six pronunciations for "x."

That's an interesting one. Apparently the author, like me, has a perceptually salient allophone of /eɪ/ before tautosyllabic /l/, which is described as a "flat-A sound". I would write the sound for me as something like [eə]. I wonder from that wording if the author has merged it with some other phoneme. It seems possible that it might merge with /æ/ in some American English accents. There are apparently people who merge the vowel of "sale" with the vowel of "sell" (either in perception or in production, or maybe just in other people's perception).

In reality, it's not a problem that the "a" at the start of alexithymia "will be seen by many readers as representing a schwa", because that's an acceptable pronunciation of the Greek "alpha privative" negative prefix in this context in an English word. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the pronunciation as "Brit./əˌlɛksᵻˈθʌɪmɪə/, U.S. /əˌlɛksəˈθaɪmiə/". The pronunciation with /eɪ/ that the author describes seems kind of over-enunciated to me.

The really weird thing about the pronunciation of "alexithymia" is the use of /aɪ/ in the stressed syllable--it would be more regular if it were /ɪ/. The letters "i" and "y" are usually pronounced as "short i" when followed by "i" or "e" before another vowel letter--e.g. Scythia, -philia, chlamydia, Syria, myriad, empyrean.

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Kind of painful to read someone talking about pronunciation with apparently no understanding of allophony or phonetic environment. E.g. you can't have <ia> = [ajej] at the end of a word, and I'm pretty sure four of those x's are allophonic.

Mandarin x is not terribly obscure-- Xi'an, Xinjiang, Deng Xiaoping-- and I think English speakers who know the words would use "sh".

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Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

I'm not going to say it's 100% predictable, mostly because I don't feel like doing a lot of research on it right now. But I suspect a few rules will handle most of the variation:

1. Unvoice the x finally, or before an unvoiced consonant (as spelled): box, exclaim, excite, expect
2. Use /kʃ/ /gʒ/ where you would find s > ʃ: anxious, sexual, luxury. Compare specious, consensual, assure.
3. Voice it just preceding the stress accent: exist, exact, exult, exhibit, example, exhort, executive
4. Unvoice the x elsewhere: exit, axis, exercise, sexual, axle, maxim, oxygen, exoplant, execute

These match my dialect at least.

I have /gz/ in exit which cannot be predicted by your rules. But yes, the rest of those words follow those for me.

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Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

I also have /gz/ in exit. I think I also have it in execute. In general, I find this whole stress-shifting thing in English very confusing for my brain.

I have /ks/ in exit but hearing it with /gz/ doesn't seem at all weird to me ... until a rare occasion when I saw Brexit mentioned in English and everyone seemed to be saying it with /gz/ and for some reason that sounds completely strange, like some kind of portmanteau of "Breakfast eggs ... it!" Maybe it's just that I'd only heard Brexit mentioned in German until then.

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Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = , ACS / ICS = , GDV = , SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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There's also X as /ɨgz/ in "Xavier", at least in my midwestern U.S. accent.

That's just /z/ for me (but I believe your pronunciation may be common here, too. I'm sure I've heard/read of it before).

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Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

My older brother planned to give his son the middle name "Xiq", pronounced /ˈziːk/.

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Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Is /reIf/ still standard in the U.K.? I knew someone with that name, but he spelled it Rafe and I didn't think of it as a variant of Ralph at the time.

÷÷÷÷÷÷
I've done /Z/ for x, too.... picked it up in my early teen years and seem to have mentally stored it as the default foreign pronunc until I made a conlang with /x/ and /h/, necessitating using both in romanization.

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

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Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

Of course not, the Brits are obviously going around saying "RRÉLF! RRÉLF!"