Attempt to win an award

I concur.

More importantly, "species" is the proper singular, not the horrible "specie". Also, what's wrong with "Peking"? Do English speakers say "Pahree" instead of "Paris"? Do they say "Praha" when they mean Prague? "Myanmar" when they mean Burma? (If you pronounce it quickly and a bit sloppily you can hear where "Burma" came from.)Why then make an exception for Peking? Does it have to do with transcription of one character set to another? Another infuriating example of this is the name Al Qaeda, pronounced as "al kaida". Whatever possessed the person who came up with that transcription to spell it with a Q? Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

It's both.

It's Pedophiles, pronounced Puh-doh-fe-lees, he was a controversial ancient Greek philosopher.

Interesting, I wasn't aware of the two different Arabic phonemes "k" and "q". Could you tell me something about the difference in pronunciation?

But you said that the k in "kid" and "cod" sound different because of the following vowel, and I had concluded that myself also. But "kalb" and "qalb" have the same vowel. If you want to pronounce each of them with their "k" to sound like their respective phonemes in "kid" and "cod", you have to force yourself. Of course, this could be due to growing up with a different phoneme system than the one native speakers of Arabic grow up with. It would be a reason to use different transcriptions...You have convinced me. Thank you.