why do Chinese words/names use X for the Sh- sound?

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why do Chinese words/names use X for the Sh- sound?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

To give a broader answer:

Not all languages have the same sounds, and indeed Chinese has several sounds that aren’t really in English.

Languages like Chinese aren’t originally written with the Latin alphabet (which is the alphabet English, Spanish, French etc. uses), so people decided on certain rules for how to do the conversion. It’s primarily for convenience, to facilitate communication between speakers of the different languages, but it’s only an approximation. Because as mentioned earlier, languages simply don’t have the same sounds as each other.

There is no such thing as a “Chinese X” so to speak. The “x” symbol is just used as an approximation to write Chinese words using a system that was not designed for it.

And also the short answer is “sh” had already been assigned to a different sound. The sounds represented by “sh” and “x” in the pinyin system are distinct, so they wanted to use different symbols to represent them.

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