Hi everyone and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy and this is our 44th episode.

Today's topic is about the X sound and is taken directly from the pronunciation forums.

I want to thank Ali 22 in California for starting this topic and Alberto in New York for adding a comment to it.

If you've never gone and looked at the forums, go to www.prenuncian.com forward slash forums.

Check them out, read the topics, start a topic of your own, or add to an ongoing topic. It is all

absolutely free. I thought Ali 22's question was so interesting that I decided to do a little more research on the letter.

The letter X is an odd little letter.

Because the letter represents two sounds, usually K plus S, whereas most letters in English represent only one sound at a time,

X has caught the attention of many famous people of America's past, all the way back to the birth of the country itself.

Benjamin Franklin, one of our forefathers, suggested removing the letter from the alphabet.

It wasn't just the X that bothered him, though. He also wanted to get rid of C, J, Q, W, and Y,

since they can all be represented by other letters.

Literary great Mark Twain also had issues with the letter X.

He suggested, in satire, that we get rid of the X, and then reintroduce it to represent the

TH sounds, so that sound could be represented by a single letter.

I guess the X was supposed to represent both the voiced and unvoiced TH sound, but I don't know for sure.

Mr. Twain didn't get into that much detail.

Perhaps the best known name in linguistics regarding English for non-native speakers is Noah Webster,

the original creator of the great Webster's dictionary. Webster was all about spelling reform

and did do a number of things to make English spelling simpler. Unfortunately, his solutions created new confusions because British English did not follow along.

That is the reason for those differences in spelling between British and American spelling.

...