why do Chinese words/names use X for the Sh- sound?
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So the Pinyin system is not the original phonic symbols, it was actually ChuYing aka BoPoMoFo, PinYin is a legacy of the Romanization of Chinese movement by the Chinese communist party after PRC is formed, where people were trying to replace Chinese characters with Latin alphabet spelled “words.”. Obviously this was a failure because of how the Chinese words are but PinYin which is the foundation of making up the sound, became the phonic standard in China.
In essence, PinYin borrows Latin characters to map to BoPoMoFo, so X maps to the ㄒ sound which is sh- but Sh maps to the ㄕ Shi sound, so on and so forth.
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