A phonological pronunciation of Xisuma.
I believe I can solve this debate through the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and my own personal etymological reasoning for once and for all two seconds before we go back to the debate. (Turns out I didn’t help at all).
Using the IPA I can deduce the pronunciation of Xisuma is pronounced as (German)ch, i (as in it), s (as in soup), u (as in French où), m (as in make) and a (as in German Tanz). You might notice, this is really hard for an English to pronounce, so instead I’ve opted for a slightly more rational… rationality?
I have recently learnt Xisuma’s name comes from a backwards spelling of the English word “music” (received pronunciatio /ˈmjuː.zɪk/) with an x replacing the c and an a to make it sound better (yes I’m an idiot). Now let’s get into it. “X” (/ɛks/) in the English language when used as the initial sound in a word usually makes a /z/ or a /ʃ/ (sh) sound. I more often hear /z/ and music spelt musix would sound like /ˈmjuː.zɪks/ I’ll go with that. I ends up being pretty easy, just ending up as the IPA spelling /i/ which is like i in “it”. In music “s” is not pronounced /s/ like normal but rather /z/, and the same I think would work for Xisuma. “U” ends up a little difficult, as the first element of music /ˈmjuː/ could be interpreted as the /m/ taking the /j/ (English y as in yogurt) or the /uː/ (oo) taking the /j/, however I personally find /juː/ easier on the tongue. Now we’ve sorted /uː/ and /m/ in one go we’re now at “a” which we could easily just sum up to being the IPA /a/ and call it that, but we’re a lazy language and are accustomed to the “-er” noun ending so I think we can make it an /ə/.
So in the end the phonetic spelling should end up looking something like these:
Xisuma: /zi.zjuː.mə/ or /ʃi.zjuː.mə/ (zih-zyoo-muh or shih-zyoo-muh)
I of course, am not a professional, and just have linguistics as a hobby. However I thought this was a fun thought experiment.
Thank you for reading