Roots ending in "X" ("hard H") tend towards disgust?

[Robert Orr]

What may be interesting here is the attitude of English-speakers to the
voiceless
velar fricative, which, although it is still phonemic in certain varieties,
is exotic in most others.

In English speakers' perceptions of German*, Scots, Welsh, and Gaelic it is
a salient feature.

It doesn't seem so in their perceptions of Russian and other Slavic
languages, though - possibly because phonetically it has less friction than
in, e.g., German or Gaelic.


Over Slavic as a whole "x" seems to have an affective nature in certan
lexical items.  Shevelov has a discussion of it in "A Prehistory of Slavic"
and  Priestly has an article on it in Canadian Slavonic Papers in 1978.

There is a sort of folk mythology that German and Scots are mutually
intelligible, which can be traced back to the fact that both have the
voiceless velar fricative, sometimes in cognate lexical items.

Robert Orr

*Possibly because Germans and Scots are stereotyped as saying "Ach" and
"Och" respectively (Germans especially from comic strips dealing with the
World Wars). The first actual German word many boys of my generation learned
was "Achtung!" Most of them stopped there.

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