Don Quijote

Thanks for all the detailed explanations regarding the pronunciation. Most (Austrian) German speakers also say kee-ho-teh, but some Germans pronounce it kee-sho-teh. As for the spelling, I feel a bit stupid now because I should have known that. I think there was even a discussion about the old Spanish X having been replaced by a J in Spain on SiT some time ago.
I believe another non-standard use of X is Uxmal (pronounced Ushmal).

Uxmal is a pretty standard Maya word. This is not a Spanish, but a Maya name and in modern Maya all "sh" sounds are written "x".

palindroma says that in archaic Spanish x and j had the sound of modern Spanish j. Are we sure of that?

I ask because of the English word sherry, formerly sherris, deriving from the name of Jerez/Xerez de la Frontera. That suggests that that sound had a sh-like sound at the time of the borrowing (16th century maybe?), or else we'd be calling it herry. The transcription of the Mayan sound sh as x suggests the same thing,at about the same period (if my guess about the date of the borrowing of sherris/sherry is right).

{quote:title=istvan wrote:}{quote}
Thanks for all the detailed explanations regarding the pronunciation. Most (Austrian) German speakers also say kee-ho-teh, but some Germans pronounce it kee-sho-teh. As for the spelling, I feel a bit stupid now because I should have known that. I think there was even a discussion about the old Spanish X having been replaced by a J in Spain on SiT some time ago.
I believe another non-standard use of X is Uxmal (pronounced Ushmal).

There is a theory that Don Quixote really was a translation from a Moorish tale and not Cervantes's own. I don't remember the details, but at least part of it hinged on the idea that the "x" in Quixote was the letter substituted by the translator for the Arabic letter "sh" (ش). Whatever the truth, his Turkish name is "Don Kişot" (where ş = sh).

Vinny, you are undoubtedly correct. The X in Spanish has been a continuously evolving thing (or maybe a dialectic one). Cervantes used it as a English H or a Castilian J (which is the German phoneme CH), no one is exactly certain which, later Spanish orthographers transliterating the many indigenous names in Mexico, assigned it to the phoneme represented in English by SH. Spanish purists still prefer the German CH phoneme for the Spanish J and G before e or i, but most of the world simply pronounces it as the English H.

The Turkish pronunciation is presumably borrowed from the French, who write it Don Quichotte.

And this French wikipedia pagesays that the French pronunciation preserves the original Spanish pronunciation, as does the Italian Chisciotte and the Portuguese Quxote, pronounced with a "sh".

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To boxxla:
in Don Quixote, Cervantes speaks all the time about an arabic author called Cide Amete Benengeli (if I recall correctly). Cervantes plays a game with the readers about the fact that he was not the original author, but it's just a game.

The wiki article is very interesting. It seems there was not only a Spanish spelling reform, but also a subsequent sound shift. The original pronunciation of X might also explain something else. The book about Spain I've been reading says that the name of the region La Mancha is derived from the Arabic manxa (that's the transliteration they use; the word meaning dry land). So at the time, the X obviously represented a ch sound as well.

Edited by: istvan
My French is not very good, so I misunderstood the wikipedia article. It says that the sound shift preceeded the spelling reform.

{quote:title=kamo wrote:}{quote}
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To boxxla:
in Don Quixote, Cervantes speaks all the time about an arabic author called Cide Amete Benengeli (if I recall correctly). Cervantes plays a game with the readers about the fact that he was not the original author, but it's just a game.

Yeah, but this was saying that the whole thing was written by an Arab.