Wrong place name pronunciation

[KNTRO]

[janKipo]

About your footpiece, probably 'sina toki kepeken toki Epanja' "You speak Spanish", not "You are the Spanish language" as you wrote.

x is a velar fricative,which offers the choice of a velar sound, k, or a frictive s. Sonja chose s, possibly influenced by the fact that it was until recently pronounced sh and still is in parts of Mexico. The argument for k is a good one but lacks side argumentsother than English usage, which struggle to avoid.

[KNTRO]

[janKipo]

No, we try to avoid English input and arguments that veer close to English are automatically suspect. So the case for/s/ is that it is a fricative, like /x/, is a sibilant like /x/used to be and still is in parts of Mexico (admittedly not parts where Spanish is dominant, but the "Mexico" is not basically a Spanish word), while /k/ is properly velar but plays to an Anglo preference. ("Texas" fares worse, with many folks preferring 'Tejas', which has only spelling, but not either Anglo spelling nor pronunciation.

[KNTRO]

[janKipo]

But in the old Spanish, they were pronounced Shavier, Meshiko, and Teshas. So, back to Sonja’s side again. To the practical point, modern Spanish /x/ offers a choice for toki pona, /k/ for its velarity or /s/ for its fricativity. There is, at that point, no decisive reason for one rather than the other, so you use subjective factors. I don’t know Sonja’s subjective source here; maybe it’s just that ‘Mesiko’ “sounds better” than ‘Mekiko’ (it does to me). In any case, we are, as you note, stuck with it.