Pronunciation of Chattan?

[wildrover]

Hmmm...makes me think of the difference in pronunciation between Norwegian and Danish. The guttural G...I am imagining something close to a glottal stop...? Do you have an example?

Where is there a "kh" in Mexico? Maybe I'm missing it...there is a difference between a Mexican accent and a Spanish accent, and I learned "Spain" Spanish rather than "Mexico" Spanish when I was younger, so my pronunciation is a little different than a lot of guys in the area who speak Spanish as a first language. Come to think of it, I'm not sure OTOH if Mexicans add a "kh" as in "Mehikho" or not...the sound I make at the "c" isn't anything like "loch" or the description of the "kh" sound...it's like the "kh", but much softer.

?

-Sean

The various assertions on how to pronounce Chattan intrigued me because, since I speak Afrikaans and German (and a bit of Dutch) the guttural sound found in loch is very familiar to me.
There is a general English-speaking tendency to lose that sound wherever possible (it was part of Anglo-Saxon).
It is a dead give-away when an English-speaker tries to speak Afrikaans and gets the g-sound wrong (both g and ch have guttural pronunciations in Dutch and Afrikaans).
And in the wider world we come across people who rave over the “locks” of Scotland and, especially in the US, those who anglicise Hispanic names like Juan (Wan), Julio (Hoolio) and Mexico (Meksiko) where there properly are kh-sounds.
The public school-educated sons of Scottish lords and lairds also fall into this trap, so I am not surprised to learn that at least one claimant to the chiefship of Clan Chattan talks of Clan Hatton.
But I am happy to have my suspicions confirmed and to continue speaking of Clan Khattan.
Regards,
Mike

[Morris at Heathfield]

The guttural G...I am imagining something close to a glottal stop...? Do you have an example?

A fricative g, I believe, like the g in Spanish where it doesn't occur at the beginning of the word (or after n, or before i or e...). Examples: lago (lagho), galgo (galgho)

Except that, from what I've read, Afrikaans has no fricative g, it having merged with the fricative c/k, so it would be the same "kh" sound that has been discussed previously in this thread.

Where is there a "kh" in Mexico?

In the x: Mekhiko

[Cygnus]

In the x: Mekhiko

Only for those that don't speak like the natives. It has the Mexica (Aztec) pronunciation of meh-HEE-coh.

But that is a just a wee bit off topic.

EDIT: My point was to say that I've never heard natives pronounce the "x" in "Mexico" as anything but an "h" sound, and I know plenty of them. That's not to say, though, that the "x" wasn't a "kh" sound in the Nahuatl languages prior to the Spanish influence.

[ThistleDown]

Only for those that don't speak like the natives. It has the Mexica (Aztec) pronunciation of meh-HEE-coh.

But that is a just a wee bit off topic.

Yes, and no, Brian. I think we are still addressing the OP's question when we bring in similar variations in other languages in support of points in our own discussion.

Rex

[Morris at Heathfield]

Only for those that don't speak like the natives. It has the Mexica (Aztec) pronunciation of meh-HEE-coh.

But that is a just a wee bit off topic.

EDIT: My point was to say that I've never heard natives pronounce the "x" in "Mexico" as anything but an "h" sound, and I know plenty of them. That's not to say, though, that the "x" wasn't a "kh" sound in the Nahuatl languages prior to the Spanish influence.

You're right. Theoretically, the Spanish j, g (before i and e), and x (when it isn't pronounced like Latin x), are all pronounced like the ch in "loch", but my trusty Spanish dictionary notes that that sound is pronounced more like English "h" in the Central American countries. (It doesn't say anything one way or another about its pronunciation in Mexico.)

As for the Nahuatl and other Indian languages, it's my understanding that the letter x in Spanish was pronounced much like English sh at the time the Spaniards arrived, and so was used to spell that same sound in those languages. Later, as the sound changed to "kh" in Spanish, the spelling was often changed to j. This is evident in the name of Texas, for example, which is now spelled "Tejas" in Spanish.

And I agree that the constituent clans of Clan Chattan should be permitted to march together. I imagine the objection is that the clans normally appear in nice, orderly, alphabetical order, and grouping up the constituent clans of Clan Chattan would throw off that order.