# Arabic: Use of foreign letter X.



## Rainbowlight

Hello everyone,

I would like to know how the letter _x_ is voiced in Arabic when a speaker uses a foreign word that includes the letter.

Is there a similar, approximate sound in the Arabic alphabet?

Thanks for your help! : )


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## Platytude

The letter x is pronounced differently in different languages and positions in the word. If you mean the sound [ks], Arabic doesn't have problem pronouncing it (they'll write it with their equivalent of the letters k and s).


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## Rainbowlight

Platytude said:


> The letter x is pronounced differently in different languages and positions in the word. If you mean the sound [ks], Arabic doesn't have problem pronouncing it (they'll write it with their equivalent of the letters k and s).


Thank you very much. By the way, would you happen to know if there is an Arabic letter that conveys the sound [ʃ], as in English _she_,_ shave or_ _short_?


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## entangledbank

Yes, that's the letter *ش*, called _shin_, as in the _Shari'a_ law system, or _shaykh_ (old man, elder, sheikh).


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## Abaye

You can search Arabic Alphabet in Wikipedia.


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## Rainbowlight

Abaye said:


> You can search Arabic Alphabet in Wikipedia.


Thanks for your answer.

Even if I searched an Arabic alphabet on Wikipedia, how would I know with absolute certainty which sound corresponds to each letter?

I actually prefer to get an answer from a native speaker, as I sometimes think that the Internet and the so-called _facts_ one finds on it can be quite unreliable.

Thanks again for your help.


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## Rainbowlight

entangledbank said:


> Yes, that's the letter *ش*, called _shin_, as in the _Shari'a_ law system, or _shaykh_ (old man, elder, sheikh).


Thank you very much! : )


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## Abaye

Rainbowlight said:


> Even if I searched an Arabic alphabet on Wikipedia, how would I know with absolute certainty which sound corresponds to each letter?


Seems you didn't try Wikipedia yet, this is the article Arabic alphabet - Wikipedia, it's informative, it tells you which letters are there and what their sound is.


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## Hulalessar

Rainbowlight said:


> Even if I searched an Arabic alphabet on Wikipedia, how would I know with absolute certainty which sound corresponds to each letter?
> 
> I actually prefer to get an answer from a native speaker, as I sometimes think that the Internet and the so-called _facts_ one finds on it can be quite unreliable.


A native speaker may confuse you! Asking a native speaker of Spanish how to pronounce "gracias" you will get one of four possible answers.

This page: Arabic alphabet - Wikipedia gives the standard pronunciation of all the letters in literary Arabic. They are the pronunciations anyone studying Arabic formally will learn. You will not find a better guide.


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## Penyafort

I agree. But not everybody understands IPA symbols or their description. And the English transliteration from Arabic is different to the Spanish one. Just think of _jarchas _vs _kharjas_.


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## Hulalessar

A transliteration will not give a guide as to how the letters representing sounds with no equivalent in Spanish or English sound. Rainbowlight has not said why s/he wants to know what letters represent what sounds.


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## Rainbowlight

Abaye said:


> Seems you didn't try Wikipedia yet, this is the article Arabic alphabet - Wikipedia, it's informative, it tells you which letters are there and what their sound is.


Thanks for your help! : )


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## Rainbowlight

Hulalessar said:


> A native speaker may confuse you! Asking a native speaker of Spanish how to pronounce "gracias" you will get one of four possible answers.
> 
> This page: Arabic alphabet - Wikipedia gives the standard pronunciation of all the letters in literary Arabic. They are the pronunciations anyone studying Arabic formally will learn. You will not find a better guide.


Thank you.

I have to say that I disagree with the four answer theory. There is indeed an orthodox way to pronounce "gracias". As it happens in many other languages, there is of course an ideal, abstract "language" and the actual pronunciation of speakers.


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## Rainbowlight

Hulalessar said:


> A transliteration will not give a guide as to how the letters representing sounds with no equivalent in Spanish or English sound. Rainbowlight has not said why s/he wants to know what letters represent what sounds.


Well, it piques my curiosity that there doesn't seem to be an Arabic letter in which the strokes are opposite of each other, as it happens with the letter X. Indeed, that letter seems to be somehow foreign in some European alphabets. It is not abundant in languages such as English or German either.


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## Penyafort

The problem is we don't know what sound you are referring to by mentioning the letter x, because it may be read as _ks, sh, h,_ etc., depending on the language.

If you're referring to the graphic representation, there is no such thing as a letter with two crossed strokes in the Arabic alphabet.


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## Rainbowlight

Penyafort said:


> The problem is we don't know what sound you are referring to by mentioning the letter x, because it may be read as _ks, sh, h,_ etc., depending on the language.
> 
> If you're referring to the graphic representation, there is no such thing as a letter with two crossed strokes in the Arabic alphabet.


Ok, now I understand your point. : )

I was just trying to trace some parallels between the sounds of several letters of the Latin alphabet and those of other languages, especially Semitic ones.

It has always struck me as odd that the letters _x_, _j_ and _s_ are sometimes interchangeable in the Spanish language. Take the surname Jímenez (starting with an [x]), which, depending on the speaker, is sometimes pronounced as Ximénez (starting with a [ʃ].

Another is the the Spanish word for soap, which is _jabón_. Again, depending on the location, it is sometimes pronounced as xabón (starting with a [ʃ], jabón (starting with a [x]) or even sabón (starting with an .


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## Penyafort

That is because _x_ in the Iberian Peninsula has traditionally represented a _sh_ sound. It still does in Galician-Portuguese, Catalan, Basque, Asturian and Aragonese, and it did in Old Castilian too, before changing into the _jota _sound.

In that sense, as entangledbank said above, the equivalent in Arabic is the *ش *(shin letter). This is why Arabic words such as _*sheik*_ or *sharaab *became _*xeique *_and *xarope *in Portuguese, _*xeic *_and *xarop *in Catalan and _*xeque *_and *xarabe *in Old Spanish (nowadays _*jeque *_and _*jarabe*_).


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## Hulalessar

Rainbowlight said:


> I have to say that I disagree with the four answer theory. There is indeed an orthodox way to pronounce "gracias". As it happens in many other languages, there is of course an ideal, abstract "language" and the actual pronunciation of speakers.


My point was that whatever the standard pronunciation (in Spain the <c> pronounced as the <th> in <think> and the <s> as the <s> in <sink>), regional variations may pronounce the <c> as /s/ and/or omit the <s> giving four possibilities. There are in fact more possibilities as the <s> may be aspirated or even pronounced like the <th> in  <think>.

Whatever is the case in practice, all alphabetical writing systems start out, at least in theory, to represent one variety of a language. Any written word is two things. It is a sign of another sign (the spoken word) and also a direct sign of the thing the spoken word is a sign for.


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## Hulalessar

Rainbowlight said:


> I was just trying to trace some parallels between the sounds of several letters of the Latin alphabet and those of other languages, especially Semitic ones.


The starting point here has to be Phoenician and Greek. The two languages had quite different phonologies and the Phoenician alphabet did not have vowels. When the Greeks took over the Phoenician alphabet they had to adapt it to Greek, including reassigning some of the letters as vowels. To start with there was no unified system. In early Western Greek the letter χ represented the sound /ks/ whereas in Classical Greek it came to represent /kh/. The Etruscans borrowed the early Western Greek alphabet and the Romans borrowed the Etruscan alphabet. That explains why in Latin <x> represents /ks/ and not /kh/. When the Romans wanted to represent χ they use <ch>.

In many languages <x> was a convenient letter to draw on if the language did not have /ks/ in its phonology and the language had a sound for which no other existing letter was available.

As the Greek alphabet developed and the outward forms changed, so its relationship to Phoenician became less apparent. The same thing may be said of the Arabic and Hebrew scripts, both of which ultimately derive from Phoenician. The outward forms of the Greek (and the scripts derived from it), Arabic and Hebrew alphabets in use to day appear to have no relationship to each other, but the relationship is clearly established by showing how each script developed.


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## Rainbowlight

Penyafort said:


> That is because _x_ in the Iberian Peninsula has traditionally represented a _sh_ sound. It still does in Galician-Portuguese, Catalan, Basque, Asturian and Aragonese, and it did in Old Castilian too, before changing into the _jota _sound.
> 
> In that sense, as entangledbank said above, the equivalent in Arabic is the *ش *(shin letter). This is why Arabic words such as _*sheik*_ or *sharaab *became _*xeique *_and *xarope *in Portuguese, _*xeic *_and *xarop *in Catalan and _*xeque *_and *xarabe *in Old Spanish (nowadays _*jeque *_and _*jarabe*_).


Thanks!


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## Rainbowlight

Hulalessar said:


> The starting point here has to be Phoenician and Greek. The two languages had quite different phonologies and the Phoenician alphabet did not have vowels. When the Greeks took over the Phoenician alphabet they had to adapt it to Greek, including reassigning some of the letters as vowels. To start with there was no unified system. In early Western Greek the letter χ represented the sound /ks/ whereas in Classical Greek it came to represent /kh/. The Etruscans borrowed the early Western Greek alphabet and the Romans borrowed the Etruscan alphabet. That explains why in Latin <x> represents /ks/ and not /kh/. When the Romans wanted to represent χ they use <ch>.
> 
> In many languages <x> was a convenient letter to draw on if the language did not have /ks/ in its phonology and the language had a sound for which no other existing letter was available.
> 
> As the Greek alphabet developed and the outward forms changed, so its relationship to Phoenician became less apparent. The same thing may be said of the Arabic and Hebrew scripts, both of which ultimately derive from Phoenician. The outward forms of the Greek (and the scripts derived from it), Arabic and Hebrew alphabets in use to day appear to have no relationship to each other, but the relationship is clearly established by showing how each script developed.


I certainly do not plan to embark on a full-on study of all the possible links between Semitic languages and Romance ones, but I certainly enjoy discovering that these branches have indeed some things in common. : )


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## WadiH

Rainbowlight said:


> Well, it piques my curiosity that there doesn't seem to be an Arabic letter in which the strokes are opposite of each other, as it happens with the letter X. Indeed, that letter seems to be somehow foreign in some European alphabets. It is not abundant in languages such as English or German either.



I think we discussed this before. The Arabic script descended from the Aramaic script via the Nabatean script.  The Aramaic and Nabatean had a character called _aleph_ (equivalent to Latin "A" and Greek "alpha), and it sometimes was represented by something that looked like an 'x', but this became a straight line ا when the script evolved into Arabic.  This is a historical accident -- the same thing happened in the Syriac script, which also descended from the Aramaic script and so is a 'sister' script of the Arabic.  It might have something to do with both scripts being cursive.  If you look at the first row of the table here, you'll see Nabatean had three variants for 'aleph' -- the middle one is probably what became Arabic ا.

I mentioned in a previous thread that the Arabian Peninsula had its own separate alphabetic tradition, which went extinct shortly before Islam and was used to write various local languages, including Arabic.  It had a '+'-shaped symbol, but it was used to represent the sound 't' (and indeed it is the same 't' that you have in the Latin alphabet, since all these alphabets are ultimately descended from the same original script).


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## Abaye

As written above for Nabatean, the "square" Hebrew script (that is, Aramaic letters vs. the ancient ones which are practically identical to the proto-Canaanite alphabet) also has letter aleph א very similar to X.

In the proto-Canaanite script, the letter for taw, (of which roman T evolved), was written as X. It's the last alphabet character, the meaning of "taw" in Canaanite/Hebrew is simply "character", so we may speculate that whoever invented it added this letter after other characters were already there, and wasn't imaginative enough to draw anything beyond "X" or call it anything beyond "character".


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## Hulalessar

The table here: Proto-Sinaitic script - Wikipedia shows "Possible correspondences between Proto-Sinaitic, Ancient South Arabian and Phoenician letters. Also modern Hebrew, Arabic and Latin letters are shown."


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## Rainbowlight

WadiH said:


> I think we discussed this before. The Arabic script descended from the Aramaic script via the Nabatean script.  The Aramaic and Nabatean had a character called _aleph_ (equivalent to Latin "A" and Greek "alpha), and it sometimes was represented by something that looked like an 'x', but this became a straight line ا when the script evolved into Arabic.  This is a historical accident -- the same thing happened in the Syriac script, which also descended from the Aramaic script and so is a 'sister' script of the Arabic.  It might have something to do with both scripts being cursive.  If you look at the first row of the table here, you'll see Nabatean had three variants for 'aleph' -- the middle one is probably what became Arabic ا.
> 
> I mentioned in a previous thread that the Arabian Peninsula had its own separate alphabetic tradition, which went extinct shortly before Islam and was used to write various local languages, including Arabic.  It had a '+'-shaped symbol, but it was used to represent the sound 't' (and indeed it is the same 't' that you have in the Latin alphabet, since all these alphabets are ultimately descended from the same original script).


Thank you very much.


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