I really love language and linguistics. If were more disciplined about learning languages, I could have been a linguist. How languages evolve - how vowels shift, how a letter that is written or sounds one way in one language mutates into others in related languages as time goes - on fascinates me.
I've been thinking about this recently because I work in the registrar's office at a small liberal arts university and I was one of the first people outside of the humanities department to find out that we are going to be offering beginning Mandarin next fall. The professor who told me about this is the head of the language department. She specializes in Spanish and we often say "gracias" to each other in emails. I was thinking about how I could start saying thank you in Mandarin.
I've known how to say "thank you" in Mandarin since I was really little; my parents always encouraged us to say thank you in the languages of the Chinese and Mexican restaurants we frequented. Thank you in Mandarin is pronounced "shay-shay" (as best my European-language-familiar self can transliterate). I also took ballet from a young age and knew that in French the "sh" sound is written with "ch," so I always pictured the Chinese thank you spelled as "che-che." I was really thrown for a loop to find that it is usually written as "xie-xie" when using Latin letters.
Where did the X come from? It seems really random to me, of all the possible letters to make that "sh" sound, so why X? (I just went to google it - it's a long complicated explanation.)
Thinking about the "'shay-shay' is really 'xie-xie'" conundrum got me started thinking about all the ways you can write the "sh" sound in various languages. In some languages it has its own letter or character (Russian, Hebrew*). In others it's made with a combination of letters - "sh" in English of course, "ch" in French, "si" or "se" in Irish Gaelic (as in "sidhe"** and Sean), and "sch" in German.
*Oddly enough, the characters look similar enough that I wonder if that's where the Russian character came from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_(letter)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha_(Cyrillic)
**Pronounced "shee," but that's another post.
What does this have to do with writing? If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that one of my conundrums is the decision between writing foreign names and words truly to their language (and therefor possibly having to provide a pronunciation guide) or writing them how they sound. Of course, right now, none of my novels with "foreign" names takes place in the real world: the one with the Welsh and Latin inspired names and the one with the German and Italian inspired names both tale place in fictional worlds. So I guess I can make up my own language rules : )