Clarification/Follow-up by captainoutrageous on 09/26/06 11:40 am:
Elliot,

Actually the Russian letter that looks like our X has a sound close to our H. I speak Russian, by the way.

"х - no exact counterpart in English since English "h" is pronounced as a pharyngeal sound and Russian "х" is articulated by the back part of the tongue touching the soft palate, it is rather like German "ch" in "Buch" (Ha sound with a lot of air -), e.g. плохой (bad) [sounds like pla-hoy](hard), хитрый [sounds hea-tri](cunning, crafty) (soft)" http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Bookstore/3230/pronunciation.html

Clarification/Follow-up by ETWolverine on 09/26/06 12:02 pm:
Thanks for the clarification. My grandparents speak Russian, German, Polish, Yiddish, English and read Hebrew (understand a bit of it too). Not bad for a bunch of old-country FOBs that didn't finish high school (in some cases didn't even finish grade school).

The sound you speak of is roughly the same as the Syrian pronounciation of the letter "chet" in Hebrew... a hard H or a soft CH (as in Hannukah). This differs from the Ashkenazic pronounciation of the letter "chet" which is more gutteral.

So we are saying roughly the same thing.

Elliot

Clarification/Follow-up by captainoutrageous on 09/26/06 1:56 pm:
Da!