that is if you want to pronounce it the correct way. Dutch people from above the big rivers give it a disgusting 'throaty coughing up mucus' sound with it. NEVER A K THOUGH!
It wasn't meant to be a K sound. In America we use KH to spell the sound of the Cyrillic letter
X, and the equivalent Arabic letter. We're not consistent, we use CH for the Greek letter that has the same form and pronunciation, but then we usually pronounce that as a K, as in "psyche." Same for the Hebrew letter
kheth: sholem alechem, not
alekhem. We know that German
ach has the same sound, but most of us don't know that the CH in
ich is a different, rare phoneme. Many of us know that Spanish J is pronounced that way, but more of us pronounce it as an H. And there are probably only a hundred of us who know that Romanian spells that sound with an H.
For this reason I usually transcribe that sound, a voiceless fricative, as KH. I should have known that one day someone would misinterpret even that.
All life-forms on Earth are carbon based, but some scientists as well as science-fiction writers speculate that it is possible for life on other planets to be based on silicon or another likely chemical element.
"Hard" sci-fi writers (scientists who write fiction) have postulated alien life based on gases, liquids, crystals, and pure energy. James P. Hogan wrote about one that looked to us like a bunch of highly advanced machinery--and they had invented technology using a substance they had created artificially which looked to us like organic tissue. Each race assumed the other was the leftover artifacts from a long-dead species that resembled itself, when in fact each had proven the other's theory of abiogenesis.
I never heard the term "lifeform" used until Star Trek. Before that we got along just fine with the word "species."
