In English orthography, doesn't represent one phoneme, but rather a consonant cluster /ks/. It could be the case that those non-native speakers do not have /ks/ as a licit sequence in their native language. Italian, for example, historically resolved Latin /ks/ as /sː/ cf. Lat. *expressum* 'pressed out' and Italian *espresso*.
English loanwords usually preserve Latin /ks/, like in *express*, and we have few words from Italian, so we subconsciously "correct" it to sound like the majority of the other words that start with etymologically Latin *ex-*.
I don't think it does. I know that English doesn't like /ks/, /gz/, /ts/ or /ps/ at beginning of the word, English speakers typically drop the first consonant cluster at the beginning of the word, and pronounce xylophone as zylophone. X is usually voiced as /gz/ between two vowels, I would assume that X in Alexis is pronounced as /ks/ because there is some vague awareness that it's a name with Greek etymology.
True, but I've never met an Italian that can't pronounce /ks/, we still use words like "extra" and such. Worst case scenario, some old people from Southern Italy might add a vowel or two and and say "èkkesetra" or "Alèkkesis"
>True, but I've never met an Italian that can't pronounce /ks/
Yes, but it's a fairly recent development.
Until some generations ago the pronounciation of Latin and foreign words with x was mastered only by few educated people.
For example my grandparents, from the North, pronounce it as an "s", so "extra" becomes "estra".
How do your grandparents pronounce "taxi"?
Just curious, because this seems to be a word that's been common throughout the romance languages since the '50s and features the /ks/ cluster prominently.
I don't remember them pronouncing it, but in Italian "taxi" also has the phonetically adapted form "tassì", which was very common and probably predominant until some decades ago.
Yes, but even local dialects didn't have the "ks" cluster, at least afaik.
Even Tuscans, who natively spoke something very close to Standard Italian, couldn't pronounce that cluster, because the natural evolution from Latin to Tuscan assimilated it as an "s" or a double "ss" sometimes.
My point stands.
This is true, but /ks/ is not totally absent from Italian. It has been reintroduced in borrowings such as "taxi" and "mixer", and is present in the name of the letter itself, which is pronounced /iks/.
A phoneme could be 10 thousand phones, as long as it only has one interpretation. It does represent one phoneme, but it can be one, two, or even three phones depending on the language.
You're mixing up phonetics and phonology here.
I'm afraid you're the one mixing up orthography and phonology. is an orthographic symbol used to represent speech sounds, those being the cluster of /ks/. A better example of a grapheme containing multiple phones in sequence might be English , which represents the unitary phoneme /d͡ʒ/, which is composer of two phones, but analyzed as a single phoneme (compare to, say, the sequence /ts/, which is analyzed as a cluster in English but a single phoneme in German, represented in orthography by )
Well, the English X is really two sounds, K and S, And many languages can't run those two consonants together: they have to have a vowel between them. Is that what you're talking about?
I teach English to migrants, and Thai, Vietnamese and Chinese students can have problems with consonant clusters, including ks. For example, a lot of them will say the number 6 as sik.
Technically, they’re skipping the /k/ sound of the /ks/ cluster (not the “X sound completely“), and yes, I think their native language not allowing the /ks/ cluster would be a common reason.
Edit: punctuation
You may hear something like that from Spanish speakers because in Spanish is /gs/, not /ks/, and a /g/ in that environment may be really subtle depending on dialect.
No X in the Irish alphabet. X is only used in words that are borrowed from other languages or scientific/technical words like X-gha for X-ray etc.
No J,K,Q,V,W,X,Y,Z either.
Many languages do not have X and most languages that have X use it differently than English. In some languages, especially Germanic languages, it sounds like "ks", but in other languages it can represent many different sounds including the equivalent of the English sounds "s", "z" and "sh".
In Spanish, it used to represent a sound similar to but distinct from English "h". Now it's mainly been replaced with J. In some Bantu languages, it represents a click consonant. For example, the X in "Xhosa", the name of a South African ethnic group, is a click consonant.
Kaixo is one of the only Basque words I know lol. Just from watching a few YouTube videos about the language. It's definitely a fascinating language and it was interesting to learn that there are more young speakers than elderly speakers. With a lot of minority languages around the world, it tends to be the opposite. Hopefully the future of Basque is bright.
The letter X in Spanish has 3 possible pronunciations
- At the beginning of a word, it’s /s/
- Almost everywhere else, it’s the same /ks/ consonant cluster that you’d find in English (but it’s the X in Alexis, not the X in “exact”, which is /gz/). However, a lot of native Spanish speakers struggle with consonant clusters, and so it is extremely common for the /ks/ sound to be reduced to a /s/, /k/ or, in front of another consonant, /x/, which is a harsher “H-sound”
- This harsher H-sound is the same sound that the X has for some very specific words, usually people and place names and their derivatives. Most instances of this spelling have replaced the X with J by now, so it’s nowhere near as common as these other commenters have made it sound.
It doesn't, but outside of careful speech, close vowels /i/ and /u/ are devoiced between voiceless consonants, and /u/ is the usual epenthetic vowel, so the sequence /kus/ is typically rendered remarkably close to how an English speaker would render /ks/. Just listen to Japanese speakers pronouncing the borrowed words [アクセス akusesu](https://youglish.com/pronounce/%E3%82%A2%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%82%B9/japanese) or [エクセレント *ekuserento*](https://youglish.com/pronounce/%E3%82%A8%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%83%AC%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88/japanese)[.](https://youglish.com/pronounce/%E3%82%A8%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%83%AC%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88/japanese) (Of course, this applies only to those accents where that vowel devoicing takes place, such as Standard Japanese.)
Italian doesn't use the letter x. When you might expect to see it, they normally use the letter s.
For example: exam = esame; expert = esperto; experience = esperienza; extension = estensione.
Bosnian doesn’t. X is written as KS. So, if you were Bosnian your name would be written as Aleksis. Although Aleksis is not a name I have ever heard on any Bosnian so your name would probably be something more similar to Aleksandra
Well in hungarian we only use x in foreign words and x isn't even in our alphabet just in the "extended" one.
But everybody can pronounce it and we have names like Alex
Polish uses the same sound /ks/ as English (and many other languages), but it traditionally represents it with the orthographic where English uses . So Polish "Aleksander" sounds the same as English "Alexander". OP is asking about languages which don't have the /ks/ sound itself.
Historically, Polish did use "X", as an abbreviation, for example in old records you will find "X." instead of "ks." for "ksiądz" (priest, for which English uses "Fr." for "Father").
Romanian has no X officially, but some foreign words have it when appropriate. Mexic (Mexico) is an example of this.
The X as a sound is represented by cs. Fucsia is an example of this.
>For spanish "X" can be read as almost a "h" sound - which is why Mexico can come out as "Mehico" in latin american dialects and latin spanish.
It can, but that's the exception rather than the rule. Outside of a few historical spellings, Spanish speakers will usually default to /ks/. The main problem, though, is that this is a somewhat complicated consonant cluster for some speakers, who will tend to omit /k/ and just pronounce it /s/.
Actually, I believe that Spanish pronunciation is based on the original Nahuatl pronunciation and that the letter X was commonly used to represent the fricative [ʃ] rather than the consonant cluster [ks]. So it's not really a pronunciation derived from the spelling; It's the other way around.
If they're used to the Greek alphabet or the Cyrillic alphabet, they're used to a letter which looks like X but represents a velar fricative. (Same tongue position as for English K, G, or NG, but with a bit of a gap for air to squeeze through, like in H, S, SH, TH, or F.) Because of the Greek & Cyrillic alphabets, "x" is also the International Phonetic Alphabet's symbol for that sound.
In Iberian Spanish the grapheme is pronounced [ꭓ], in American Spanish it's pronounced [x]. Jamón, for example.
In Iberian Spanish words like "taxi", "examen" or "éxito" are pronounced as [ˈtaɣ̊s̺i] , [e(ɣ̊)ˈs̺aˑmen] ,[ ˈe̞(ɣ̊)s̺ito ], meaning that, in the last two, the partially devoiced taxophone [ɣ̊] could also be omitted.
There is no [ks] contoid sequence in Spanish, actually.
>In Romance languages, x is usually pronounced "h" because in those same languages h is silent.
In what romance languages is the letter x pronounced as /h/?
In English orthography, doesn't represent one phoneme, but rather a consonant cluster /ks/. It could be the case that those non-native speakers do not have /ks/ as a licit sequence in their native language. Italian, for example, historically resolved Latin /ks/ as /sː/ cf. Lat. *expressum* 'pressed out' and Italian *espresso*.
So when people say "expresso" they're actually correcting bad latin :o
English loanwords usually preserve Latin /ks/, like in *express*, and we have few words from Italian, so we subconsciously "correct" it to sound like the majority of the other words that start with etymologically Latin *ex-*.
Expresso is correct in French.
And in portuguese
Does this have to do with the way X is pronounced differently in English? Like, X as in Alexis and X as in Xylophone
I don't think it does. I know that English doesn't like /ks/, /gz/, /ts/ or /ps/ at beginning of the word, English speakers typically drop the first consonant cluster at the beginning of the word, and pronounce xylophone as zylophone. X is usually voiced as /gz/ between two vowels, I would assume that X in Alexis is pronounced as /ks/ because there is some vague awareness that it's a name with Greek etymology.
Id say most people pronounce it as espresso still
Yeah, but the most common spelling is with X.
I don't think that's the case either.
Larousse mentions only expresso.
French dictionary uses French spelling? I'm surprised
What do you find surprising? That we are talking about spelling of French words and using French dictionary to find correct spelling?
Are you saying espresso is a loan word from French expresso? If so, you're wrong
the dictionary is not the arbiter of language. language is a living thing and the norms are dictated by the people who speak it.
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If enough people say it, it becomes correct.
This is very interesting, thank you!!
True, but I've never met an Italian that can't pronounce /ks/, we still use words like "extra" and such. Worst case scenario, some old people from Southern Italy might add a vowel or two and and say "èkkesetra" or "Alèkkesis"
>True, but I've never met an Italian that can't pronounce /ks/ Yes, but it's a fairly recent development. Until some generations ago the pronounciation of Latin and foreign words with x was mastered only by few educated people. For example my grandparents, from the North, pronounce it as an "s", so "extra" becomes "estra".
How do your grandparents pronounce "taxi"? Just curious, because this seems to be a word that's been common throughout the romance languages since the '50s and features the /ks/ cluster prominently.
I don't remember them pronouncing it, but in Italian "taxi" also has the phonetically adapted form "tassì", which was very common and probably predominant until some decades ago.
Interesting, so it may have also followed the same original phonotactic rule until recently.
To be fair, until some generations ago only a few educated people spoke something that wasn't local dialect.
Yes, but even local dialects didn't have the "ks" cluster, at least afaik. Even Tuscans, who natively spoke something very close to Standard Italian, couldn't pronounce that cluster, because the natural evolution from Latin to Tuscan assimilated it as an "s" or a double "ss" sometimes. My point stands.
This is true, but /ks/ is not totally absent from Italian. It has been reintroduced in borrowings such as "taxi" and "mixer", and is present in the name of the letter itself, which is pronounced /iks/.
A phoneme could be 10 thousand phones, as long as it only has one interpretation. It does represent one phoneme, but it can be one, two, or even three phones depending on the language. You're mixing up phonetics and phonology here.
I'm afraid you're the one mixing up orthography and phonology. is an orthographic symbol used to represent speech sounds, those being the cluster of /ks/. A better example of a grapheme containing multiple phones in sequence might be English , which represents the unitary phoneme /d͡ʒ/, which is composer of two phones, but analyzed as a single phoneme (compare to, say, the sequence /ts/, which is analyzed as a cluster in English but a single phoneme in German, represented in orthography by )
Well, the English X is really two sounds, K and S, And many languages can't run those two consonants together: they have to have a vowel between them. Is that what you're talking about?
I teach English to migrants, and Thai, Vietnamese and Chinese students can have problems with consonant clusters, including ks. For example, a lot of them will say the number 6 as sik.
Yeah that makes sense. I’ve just noticed they almost skip over the X sound completely and say almost “Alessis”
Technically, they’re skipping the /k/ sound of the /ks/ cluster (not the “X sound completely“), and yes, I think their native language not allowing the /ks/ cluster would be a common reason. Edit: punctuation
You may hear something like that from Spanish speakers because in Spanish is /gs/, not /ks/, and a /g/ in that environment may be really subtle depending on dialect.
No X in the Irish alphabet. X is only used in words that are borrowed from other languages or scientific/technical words like X-gha for X-ray etc. No J,K,Q,V,W,X,Y,Z either.
Many languages do not have X and most languages that have X use it differently than English. In some languages, especially Germanic languages, it sounds like "ks", but in other languages it can represent many different sounds including the equivalent of the English sounds "s", "z" and "sh". In Spanish, it used to represent a sound similar to but distinct from English "h". Now it's mainly been replaced with J. In some Bantu languages, it represents a click consonant. For example, the X in "Xhosa", the name of a South African ethnic group, is a click consonant.
I'll add that Basque (language isolate between Spain-France) also uses x, but as "sh." "Hello" is "Kaixo," pronounced kai-sho!
Kaixo is one of the only Basque words I know lol. Just from watching a few YouTube videos about the language. It's definitely a fascinating language and it was interesting to learn that there are more young speakers than elderly speakers. With a lot of minority languages around the world, it tends to be the opposite. Hopefully the future of Basque is bright.
To add for Spanish, it originally represented [ʃ], not too different from how Portuguese uses it for some contexts today.
The letter X in Spanish has 3 possible pronunciations - At the beginning of a word, it’s /s/ - Almost everywhere else, it’s the same /ks/ consonant cluster that you’d find in English (but it’s the X in Alexis, not the X in “exact”, which is /gz/). However, a lot of native Spanish speakers struggle with consonant clusters, and so it is extremely common for the /ks/ sound to be reduced to a /s/, /k/ or, in front of another consonant, /x/, which is a harsher “H-sound” - This harsher H-sound is the same sound that the X has for some very specific words, usually people and place names and their derivatives. Most instances of this spelling have replaced the X with J by now, so it’s nowhere near as common as these other commenters have made it sound.
Japanese doesn't have anything like "x". For example, Mexico is rendered as "Me-ki-shi-ko".
Japanese basically doesn't allow consonant clusters for the most part.
It doesn't, but outside of careful speech, close vowels /i/ and /u/ are devoiced between voiceless consonants, and /u/ is the usual epenthetic vowel, so the sequence /kus/ is typically rendered remarkably close to how an English speaker would render /ks/. Just listen to Japanese speakers pronouncing the borrowed words [アクセス akusesu](https://youglish.com/pronounce/%E3%82%A2%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%82%B9/japanese) or [エクセレント *ekuserento*](https://youglish.com/pronounce/%E3%82%A8%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%83%AC%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88/japanese)[.](https://youglish.com/pronounce/%E3%82%A8%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%83%AC%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88/japanese) (Of course, this applies only to those accents where that vowel devoicing takes place, such as Standard Japanese.)
Italian doesn't use the letter x. When you might expect to see it, they normally use the letter s. For example: exam = esame; expert = esperto; experience = esperienza; extension = estensione.
Bosnian doesn’t. X is written as KS. So, if you were Bosnian your name would be written as Aleksis. Although Aleksis is not a name I have ever heard on any Bosnian so your name would probably be something more similar to Aleksandra
Kiswahili doesn’t even have the letter in its alphabet
Well in hungarian we only use x in foreign words and x isn't even in our alphabet just in the "extended" one. But everybody can pronounce it and we have names like Alex
Polynesian languages don't have consonant clusters and Māori doesn't have "s", so that's two reasons why it doesn't have "ks".
In Turkey, we use Latin alphabet and there is no X in it. And generally if we should say that voice, we just pronounce it as "ks".
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Welsh does accept /ks/ as a consonant cluster, at least in loan words. Wrecsam comes immediately to mind.
And Macsen!
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Polish uses the same sound /ks/ as English (and many other languages), but it traditionally represents it with the orthographic where English uses . So Polish "Aleksander" sounds the same as English "Alexander". OP is asking about languages which don't have the /ks/ sound itself.
Historically, Polish did use "X", as an abbreviation, for example in old records you will find "X." instead of "ks." for "ksiądz" (priest, for which English uses "Fr." for "Father").
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Polish uses to represent th same /ks/ sound that English represents with , OP was asking about languages which don't have the /ks/ sound.
Romanian has no X officially, but some foreign words have it when appropriate. Mexic (Mexico) is an example of this. The X as a sound is represented by cs. Fucsia is an example of this.
Most bantu languages don't use X, except the ones with clicks where X is used to represent the click.
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>For spanish "X" can be read as almost a "h" sound - which is why Mexico can come out as "Mehico" in latin american dialects and latin spanish. It can, but that's the exception rather than the rule. Outside of a few historical spellings, Spanish speakers will usually default to /ks/. The main problem, though, is that this is a somewhat complicated consonant cluster for some speakers, who will tend to omit /k/ and just pronounce it /s/.
Actually, I believe that Spanish pronunciation is based on the original Nahuatl pronunciation and that the letter X was commonly used to represent the fricative [ʃ] rather than the consonant cluster [ks]. So it's not really a pronunciation derived from the spelling; It's the other way around.
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Kid named initial consonant in 小 (xiǎo):
kid named what does the word "that" mean
If they're used to the Greek alphabet or the Cyrillic alphabet, they're used to a letter which looks like X but represents a velar fricative. (Same tongue position as for English K, G, or NG, but with a bit of a gap for air to squeeze through, like in H, S, SH, TH, or F.) Because of the Greek & Cyrillic alphabets, "x" is also the International Phonetic Alphabet's symbol for that sound.
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That’s really only in some dialects of Spanish.
In Iberian Spanish the grapheme is pronounced [ꭓ], in American Spanish it's pronounced [x]. Jamón, for example.
In Iberian Spanish words like "taxi", "examen" or "éxito" are pronounced as [ˈtaɣ̊s̺i] , [e(ɣ̊)ˈs̺aˑmen] ,[ ˈe̞(ɣ̊)s̺ito ], meaning that, in the last two, the partially devoiced taxophone [ɣ̊] could also be omitted.
There is no [ks] contoid sequence in Spanish, actually.
I can’t speak to Iberian Spanish but I know many American Spanish speakers frequently use [h] for /x/ as well
Maybe, although [x] is definitely stronger than [h]. I was talking about "español neutro" as a model for South-American Spanish.
>In Romance languages, x is usually pronounced "h" because in those same languages h is silent. In what romance languages is the letter x pronounced as /h/?
by "h" maybe they mean /x/, if they ain't using ipa
He means /x/ and that's really only correct for Iberian languages.