Treatment of Foreign Sounds
Because Russian borrows terms from other languages, there are various conventions in dealing with sounds not present in Russian. For example, while Russian has no, there are a number of common words (particularly proper nouns) borrowed from languages like English and German that contain such a sound in the original language. In well-established terms, such as галлюцинация ('hallucination'), this is written with ⟨г⟩ and pronounced with /g/ while newer terms use ⟨х⟩, pronounced with /x/, such as хобби ('hobby').
Similarly, words originally with in their source language are either pronounced with /t(ʲ)/), as in the name Тельма ('Thelma') or, if borrowed early enough, with /f(ʲ)/ or /v(ʲ)/, as in the names Фёдор ('Theodore') and Матве́й ('Matthew').
There are also certain tendencies in borrowed words. For example, in loanwords from French and German, palatal and velar consonants tend to be soft before /u/ so that, for example, Küchelbecker becomes Кюхельбе́кер .
Read more about this topic: Russian Alphabet
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