I’m not sure how the title of the song “Los Set Gotxs” from Llibre Vermell de Montserrat is supposed to be pronounced.
In Catalan, “tx” is a digraph, pronounced like English “ch.” So, almost like “gotchas”!
Thanks! 
…although I’m more used to seeing that word spelled goigs… (still pronounced “goch”)
In Spanish, “x” is just a pain in the ass. Depending on the origin of the word, it can be the same as the Spanish “j” (México, Xavier, Oaxaca, Ximénez) or it can be an “s” (xilófono), or it can be “ks” (ex-whatever); and then dialectal variations, hypercorrections, confusion with other languages etc. add the possibility of sounding like the English “sh”, or of the “j” moving close to the English “h”. It was well on its way to disappearing but there has been a resurgence, partly due to Ye Olde Spellinge With Ex looking more Olde and therefore classier than the spellings with j or s.
Portuguese x nearly always sounds like sh. There was a kiddie host in brazil named Xuxa, which sounds like SHOO-sha. When the x is at the end of the word, an interesting thing happens, where it sounds like “sheesh”. Apex = Uh-PEH-sheesh.
*
Why* that is, I don’t know. It’s always fascinated me, even with the commonalities of some words, how the pronunciation between words in Portuguese and Spanish diverged drastically. This happened only around 700 years ago.
Thanks everybody for the replies, especially to Johanna for her in-depth and scholarly analysis of the word roots.
This made me wonder about the word “ruler”, both in the sense of leader/king, but also the other type of “ruler”, the kind that might be found in a schoolchild’s pencil case.
The pencil case ruler is a tool whose essential feature is its straightness, for the purposes of measuring distance and drawing straight lines. Such a tool has a long history, with the earliest example dating from the 3rd millennium BC, and one can imagine how such a tool may have been used by people continuously since ancient times, in carpentry and other craftwork.
So, follow-up questions about the word “ruler”:
a) Does the word “ruler”, as in a leader/king, also derive from Proto-Indo-European *h₃rḗǵs?
b) Does the straight measuring rod type of “ruler” - or “rule” as I’ve occasionally heard it called - also derive from PIE *h₃rḗǵs? Is this directly so, because it’s, in essence, a “straight” thing? Or is it indirectly so, in the sense that, like a king/leader, it brings order to chaos, in this case the chaos of measuring things and gauging straight lines by eye and hand. Or something else altogether?
When I took Latin class, we pronounced “x” as “ks”. We did the same with the Church Latin I memorized as an altar boy.
It’s not just in “rex”, of course, but in many other words. Significantly, it’s in Ulixes, the latinized form of the name of Odysseus, hero of the Odyssey. Exactly how they got from Odysseus (actually, Odysseos, in transliterated greek) to Ulixes I never did figure out, but it’s from Ulixes that we eventually got Ulysses. That might suggest that the “x” is really pronounced like “ss” in this case, although I could still se the “ks” pronunciation being used.
Both senses of “rule/ruler” derive from Latin “regula”, meaning the actual tool and also figuratively. That, as well as “rex” and “regere”, comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root *hreg- described by Johanna. So both senses are already there in the proto-language.
Lewis & Short suggest that “Ulixes” comes from Etruscan Uluxe or Siculian Οὐλίξης, and that “Ulysses” is due to the influence of " Ὀδυσσεύς", not some mispronunciation of “x”.
Loads of Latin words contain an “x”. For example, “ex”. Nix, nox, mox, pix, vix, etc.
Church Latin reminds me of von Bielfeld’s colourful comments that it is “…nothing better than a barbarous jargon… What indeed could be expected from this language, at a time when the barbarians had taken possession of all of Europe, but especially of Italy; when the empire of the east was governed by idiots… when the priests and monks were the only men of letters, and were at the same time the most ignorant and futile mortals in the world…” I hope the Church’s grasp of Classical Latin has strengthened since (though this interview suggests that it hasn’t), but in any case I wouldn’t take it as a pronunciation guide.
There’s another “x”-footballer playing in the soccer football World Cup today - Granit Xhaka, of Swiss nationality but Albanian descent. The “x” is pronounced as a soft “j”, between “j” and “sh”. There was also Enver Hoxha, who was Albanian head of state between 1944 and 1985. In both these Albanian cases, the “x” is followed by an “h”.
So like a “zh” sound as in “treasure” or something else?
Well, I’ve heard the name through commentators and suchlike, who may not be the best source pronunciation-wise. Here’s someone pronouncing Enver Hoxha, and it sounds more like a “j”.
Yeah, to me that sounds like a straight-up regular “j” sound /dʒ/.
“Shabi” if done by someone who realizes it’s Catalan.
I think a certain interchangeability between “b” and “v” may also occur in Hindi. For example, raga Vibhas vs Bibhas, Vageshwari vs Bageshwari, or the names Vikram and Bikram, or Vijay and Bijay. Not sure why, as “v” and “b” are pronounced quite differently.
They’re both voiced labial obstruents, so they do actually have quite a bit of similarity. Note also in the Gaelic languages, that a v-or v-type sound is notated by the digraph “bh” and an f- or f-type sound is noted as “ph.” So b/v and p/f are closely related sounds, and are distinguished by adding an “h” to a “b” or “p.” (And, then, the “v” sounds can also blend into “w” sounds, like they often do in Hindi, too.)
You’ll find the same sort of pairings in Hebrew letters, too, with the “b” and “v”, “p” and “f” sounds denoted by the same letter (though sometimes distinguished by a dagesh mark.)
Also, while V in English is a labiodental fricative, in some other languages it’s a bilabial fricative, which makes it only a tiny step away from B, a bilabial plosive. Same with F and P.
Part of the problem with the last three posts is that you’re treating the letters b and v as if they were
- the basis for the sound, instead of being transcriptions,
- and, as Acsenray points out, the same for every one of the transcription systems linked to languages using the Latin alphabet, which isn’t even the only writing system out there.
When discussing phonetics, it is always important to remember that these are not Marilyn Monroe. They are pictures of her. Letters aren’t sounds. They are representations of sounds. Another letter which in Spanish “gets two pronunciations” (strictly speaking, represents two sounds, two different transcriptions) is W: the difference doesn’t have to do with evolution within Spanish, but with the origins of those different words. W for /b/ (as in Wamba) is Germanic (many are Wisigoth, or visigodas if you prefer); the other pronunciation can be transcribed in Spanish as “gu” and usually comes from English (whisky = güiski).
♪♫ Ysabel, Ysabel,
Perdiste la tu faxa ♫♪