At 13:43 -0400 2004-05-10, cowan@... wrote:

>Indeed it is, and I agree: there is no /x/ in English, though [x] ~ [X]
>occasionally appears as an L1- or L2-contaminated variety of /k/ in certain
>borrowed lexical items. (I use phoneme slashes in a Newtonian manner.)

Many dialects of English have /x/. You can call English in Wales,
Scotland, and Ireland "contaminated" but I don't think it's right to
do so. The sounds have been there for centuries, and are learned in
infancy by native speakers.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com