> What I mean is that the dialect from which the words were taken
probably had [x], but since the sound was alien to other dialects of
Old Indo-Aryan, it was substituted with the acoustically similar
phoneme /kH/, just as a [T] (a dental fricative) would have been
replaced with /tH/ in loanwords that contained it. The ritual
pronunciation of the Vedic text could only use "standard" Vedic
phonemes.
>
Your saying that the Yajur Veda shifted the word Purus.a > Puru/x/a >
Purukha? Well, I'm sure the Germans would like that.... What are the
intermediate steps that would lead to that? I have to admit I find
the hard germanic /x/ to be a bit of divergence from s. and kh
> http://web.uvic.ca/ling/ipa/handbook/
Thanks, I'm getting it now.