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So I'm looking at a bag of "XOCHiTL" corn chips. The bag helpfully provides a pronunciation guide to the name, "so- cheel" with marks to indicate the accent is on the first syllable and long-O sound. So who decided that "X" would used to indicate "S?" How is that transliteration?
While we're at it, the same with Mandarin. President Xi? Why not "She" or "Zhee?"
It seems that phonetic simplicity for English speakers would be the goal of English transliteration.
Thank you.
Transliteration is converting letters of one alphabet to those of another: you can transliterate Latin into Arabic, Arabic into Ge'ez, Ge'ez into Devanagari and Devanagari into Cyrillic. You don't transliterate Russian into Ukranian or Tajik. Modern Meso-American writing systems are Latin-based so they don't require transliteration into Latin (they are already there). But: even though you know the (vast majority of the) alphabet they use in Somali, Shona, Saami and Albanian, you have only a poor idea how words would be pronounced – you still have to know the special rules to pronounce tsv, c, dj, xh in a way that resembles the pronunciation in the original language. The rationale for seemingly crazy spelling systems is often lost in the mists of history, but in the case of Somali, Shona and Saami, the goal was to limit the number of special characters used in the alphabet – none at all in the case of Somali and Shona. Therefore, Somali spells [ʕ] as "c" (note how the letter resembles the phonetic symbol). Zulu / Xhosa etc. have a large collection of clicks and rather than litter writing with those exotic symbols, they use "x,c,q" which are otherwise unused, to denote clicks. That means that to pronounce a hypothetical string "cisa", you have to know whether it is Zulu (dental click), Somali (voiced pharyngeal approximant) or Saami (alveolar affricate), and how "c" is pronounced in those languages.
For some of these languages, it's not transliteration, it's just how the language is written! Very few Mesoamerican languages were ever written in anything except the Latin alphabet, and nowadays it's (as far as I know) completely universal. So the goal of the spelling xochitl is to make sense to Nahuatl-speakers, not to English-speakers.
For other languages, like Mandarin, the goal is to represent all the sounds of the language unambiguously in the Latin alphabet. Mandarin has two sounds that are fairly similar to the English "sh", and the difference between them is important (see the comments for examples). So one of them is transliterated as sh, the other as x, to preserve that distinction.
As for why x was chosen for that sound in Nahuatl in the first place—the modern Nahuatl orthography is descended from systems invented by Spanish-speaking colonizers. And at that point, Spanish had a sound very close to English "sh", spelled with an x (as in Old Spanish baxo "low", which became Modern Spanish bajo). So when the conquistadors needed a way to spell a similar sound in Nahuatl, they used the letter they were familiar with.
P.S. I'm assuming the chips are named from the Nahuatl word xōchitl "flower"; the Classical Nahuatl pronunciation would be something like "SHOH-cheet". That's why I talk about x being pronounced like English "sh".
