🚀 go-pugleaf

Alexander Gross wrote:
>> Joe Murphy wrote:
>> 
>> >  First, why does Russian use a "g" (gay in Russian) for transcribing
>> >  "h" sounds from another language?  An example would be "Hitler"
>> >  which in all the Russian versions I've seen of it is spelled and
>> >  pronounced "Gitler".
>> 
>> I believe Hungarian MAY do something similar.  Or at least I remember being
>> surprised when my father once told me that "kitsch" in Hungarian becomes
>> "gitsch."

Hungarian does nothing of the sort.  First of all, it has distinct
/g/, /k/, /h/ and their distribution in foreign words and names is as
expected: hamburger, g\'az, k\'alcium, Hitler, Gestapo, germanizmus, etc.

Hungarian 'giccs' is indeed a loan from German 'Kitsch'.  The Hungarian
historical/etymological dictionary, TESz, states: "A magyar szo g-je delnemet
ejtessajatsagot tukroz" i.e. g in the Hungarian word reflects the
characteristic Southern German pronunciation.   Aside from that, I can
think of a few other words in which word-initial g corresponds to k in
dictionary German, e.g. gitt "putty" <Kitt, gavall\'er < "Kavalier".
It also goes the other way, viz. kukker "(type of optical instrument)" :-)
< "Gucker", though "gukker" is probably as common.

If you look at the German section of the fourth volume of TESz, an index
of words categorized by source language, you can find many other examples
of word-initial g-k, not to mention b-p (Buss-puszi) and d-t (Dusch-tus)
disparities in German loanwords -- and many, many more examples in which 
there is no such ambiguity.  No systematic correspondence, unlike the
Russian /g/-for-/h/ thing. It's because (1) German has a lot of dialectal
variation (a great deal more than Hungarian does!), (2) voiced-unvoiced
alternation is characteristic between many of these dialects, and (3) the
forms of German words that Hungarian borrowed weren't always the same
ones that made it into the standard literary German language. 

Adam Jacobs
UCLA