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How do you pronounce the given name “Cyril”?
Because in Eastern Europe it’s pronounced “Kiril.”
The drift between cultures for hard versus soft C is also seen in B versus V-- the given name “Basil” is “Vasili” in Slavic tongues. (I think both names originate in Greece.)
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Both are from Greek, yeah. It actually has had the same softening of Β since ancient times, so Βασίλειος is now pronounced Vasilios.
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Everyone should write everything in International Phonetic Alphabet
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I know you’re kidding, but every now and then people do propose more phonetic spelling for English and it’s usually a nightmare. Suddenly English and Texan and Newfoundlander and Australian and Kenyan wouldn’t just sound different and have some oddly different words, but even the subtitles would all be mutually unintelligible. Our spelling is a mess but at least we can all still understand each other in print.
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So you are saying that when people with regional accents write English they spell the words as they pronounce them? I would expect everyone no matter what their accent to use the same dictionary spelling.
I think it’s rather the opposite. People in the USA sometimes turn on English subtitles for shows from England, Australia, New Zealand and such. There are Chinese movies with Chinese subtitles because everyone can read the subtitles even if they pronounce the dialog such that not everyone can understand it. ( Although I see that subtitles might also be required by the government for the deaf, to improve literacy, to strengthen the force of pure Mandarin etc. )
No, I said that’s what would happen if we used a phonetic system instead of dictionary spellings.
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… cuneiform 
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My name is Christine, in which the CH makes little sense as far as its usual English pronunciation goes. It’s all Jesus’ fault, so there’s no manager at whom I could complain even if I wanted to.
Listening to a great band from Recife, a city on the easternmost point of Brazil, hipped me to the pronunciation of R as H.
Bonus:
The C in the case of Recife has an S sound: the city’s name is pronounced heh-SEE-fee.
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The only two non-English languages I’ve ever studied are Italian and Mandarin, and they’re basically opposites on both of these axes.
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The Greeks had three plosives, Τ, Κ, Π, and several things that could be done to them. They could be voiced as Δ, Γ, Β, they could be sibilised (an “s” attack or release) as Ζ (zeta ≃ /ts/ or /ds/), Ξ (xi ≃ /ks/ or /gs/), Ψ (psi ≃ /ps/ or /bs/), and they could be aspirated as Θ, Χ, Φ.
The Romans borrowed these sounds into their own alphabet, even if they couldn’t pronounce some of them. T, C, P / D, G, B were easy, even if g was a later invention: early Latin used c for voiced and unvoiced, which is why the standard contraction for some praenomina were C. for Gaius, and Cn. for Gnaeus.
For the others, there were approximations. Latin Z was a voiced sibilant, not /ts/, but it was near enough. X was an already extant way of writing cs (noctis, nocti, but nox). And there was no equivalent for PS shorter than that digraph… but it was still a standard sound in Latin. urbs, particeps, scripsit, psittacus.
When the Romans borrowed the aspirated forms, they were still aspirated in Greek: /tʰ, kʰ, pʰ/. So the Romans borrowed them as digraphs as well: TH, CH, PH. And those transliterations for those letters stuck, even as Greek pronunciation turned them to lenited sounds /θ, x, ɸ/. That’s why Latin had F and PH for what was commonly pronounced as the same sound /f/. One was the native Latin letter, the other a learned borrowing from Greek Φ.
So anyway, there was this “entertaining” period in the area known as Judea, where the Romans were occupying the land, and there were all these various politico-religious groups in opposition to them, most of them claiming the authority of their holy book to do so. You may have read about this time.
To claim leadership, many of these groups were claiming to be the rightfully anointed heir to the throne of King David. Others were claiming to be the rightfully anointed successor to Aaron, the head of the Levites and the rightful high priest.
One such claimant declared himself to be both. To be the anointed one, the word in Hebrew and Aramaic is meshiach, which was translated into the Greek spoken by most of the Jewish diaspora as Χριστος, which was transliterated into Latin as Christus. (Because everyone knew that *Cristus would be the transliteration of *Κριστος, and that’s just wrong. As an aside, Latin did have the letter k, and it was almost only used for the word kalends, which ironically is the root of the English “calendar” with a “c”, because it passed through Old English on the way, oy, that’s another tangent.)
Followers of this man were called Christiani, and Christianus later became a name in its own right.
The trouble was that the average Roman couldn’t say /x/ properly, so most of them just pronounced it as c instead: /kris.tus, kris.ti.an.us/. (Being able to speak Greek was a prerequisite for being considered educated, just like speaking Latin was in Europe up to the 20th century, but even then being able to pronounce /x/ was just showing off.)
This name was trivially feminisable to Christiana, and eventually as it passed through French and then English, the final vowel was elided away, and it became /,kris’ti:n/. But old habits die hard, so even though it had been pronounced with a hard /k/ for almost two thousand years, it’s still spelled “Christine”, echoing its etymology from a Latin transliteration of a Greek translation of a Jewish word.
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Cinema used to be pronounced and sometimes spelt kinema, from the same root as kinetic and kinematics. (A few places still use the kinema spelling.)
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I always make a point of pronouncing Celt and Celtic with the hard C. Even when I am talking about the basketball team.
Okay, especially when I am talking about the basketball team.
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UK armed forces used Kinema until at least the 1950s. (According to my father who was in the RAF.)
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Even when you are talking about axe heads?
Soft “c” celts:
But if you believe this article, the traditional pronunciation was with a soft “c” until quite recently, when certain academics decided that we should use the hard pronunciation to mimic the Greek “Keltoi”.
https://www.strathspey.org/lists/strathspey%40strathspey.org/t/23369/
Never mind, you put the cettle on and I’ll bikykle to the shop and get some tea.
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Uh, the dictionary spelling would be written in the phonetic system was my interpretation of that suggestion.
I’ll get my stick and some spare clay and be right over.
How many different languages were written in cuneiform anyway? It seems to have had its uses in diplomatic messages.
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Sumerian, a language isolate.
Akkadian, Babylonian, a collection of related Semitic languages.
Hittite, an Indo-European language.
It was also used to write accounts, mythology, and homework.
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I may be wrong, but most languages point to a single source of truth for their spelling. In German it was Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, with Italian it’s Dante and the way they chose Florentine to be “high” Italian. In France Richelieu started the Academie Français to enforce uniform rules.
But English?
England got its first set of rules from a committee of printers from all over the island, so even the very beginning was a mess of compromises. This, as I recall, predated King James’ commissioned Bible, which cemented the mishmash of Germanic, French and Latin modes. And considering the rate English adopts words from other dialects, it’s not going to harmonize soon.
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