Pronunciation

[Campbell, R Joe]

Kier,

   Since the Spaniards wrote Nahuatl words in the only orthography that 
they had (i.e., Spanish), when they wrote a sequence like "xipe...", 
the "x" represented what it did in the Spanish of the 1520s -- the 
sound of present-day English "sh".
In Spanish, that sound has changed (migrated) to the sound of the 
present jota, but it has not done that in Nahuatl.
   And since present-day Spanish has no "sh" sound anymore, it is natural that
older names like "Ximena" and "Xavier" are now pronounced "Jimena" and 
"Javier".
But on the other hand, since placenames like "Xochimilco" are 
recognized for their Nahuatl origens, they are not pronounced 
"Jochimilco"; their "sh" origen hangs on -- with the absence of a "sh" 
in Spanish resulting in most people saying "sochimilco", fairly close 
to the historically correct "shochimilco".

   And the maintenance of the spelling "x" as jota (an orthographic 
archaism) is another subtopic -- "Mexico" and "Oaxaca" represent a kind 
of national loyalty to the past.  --Let "those other people" write 
"Mejico" if they want to.  |8-)

Iztayohmeh,

Joe

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