why do Chinese words/names use X for the Sh- sound?
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It’s not the Sh-sound. That’s just the closest equivalent in english. The actual sound is more similar to the ch in German ich. Make a sh-sound and form your mouth to a k, that’s what t’s supposed to sound like. Chinese has a sh sound and pinyin transcribe that as sh. The word Xuesheng shows the difference. Think more like a hissing cat than a hissing snake. And this is a very common transcription for this sound.
X and Sh are actually distinct sounds in Chinese – e.g. Xi vs. Shi are pronounced differently.
I don’t have a linguistics background so I could be misconstruing things slightly, but imo it might be more accurate to say that the Chinese X sound does not exist in English – Sh in English is just the closest sound to it. Similar to how the R and L sounds in English don’t quite exist in Japanese.
Romanized language doesn’t necessarily reflect English at all. For example, Vietnamese is way worse for Roman letter-English pronunciation mismatch.
Chinese actually has two sounds that sound similar to the English “sh-“ sound.
One of them is indeed spelled “sh”, and it appears before back vowels like “a”, “o”, and “u”. When “i” comes after “sh” in Chinese, it represents a sound like the vowel in English “ship”.
The “x” sound is different from the “sh” sound in that it’s produced more in the front of the mouth and the front teeth are closer together while the “sh” sound is produced more in the middle or back of the mouth and the front teeth are further apart.
The “x” sound is a retracted s that sounds similar to the “s” in modern Greek, and come before front vowels: “i” and “ü”. When “i” comes after “x”, it represents a different vowel, the same vowel as the “ee” in English “sheep”, which is why you hear Xi Jinping’s name pronounced like English “she”.
Pinyin is weird in that it makes the letter “i” do double duty to represent two vowels, and the dots over “ü” get dropped when the normal “u” vowel isn’t possible, so spellings like “xu” and “xue” drop the dots from the “ü”.
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