Eriau Pronunciation

(I am going to address Eriau pronunciation but I am starting a long way back.)

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol agents speak Temporal and calculate with post-Arabic numerals. See here.

Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn refers to Anglic language, Arabic numerals and metric units. See here.

We use Roman letters, derived from Greek letters which were derived from Phoenician. See here.

It is a safe bet that the Anglic language in Anderson's Technic History uses Roman letters or some close approximation.

Dominic Flandry, Anglic speaker, reflects that, in the Eriau word, "qanryf," the first letter represents, approximately, k followed by dh where dh is pronounced th. However, Merseians do not use Roman letters so why not say just that k is followed by th and write the word as kthanryf? James Blish makes exactly the same kind of points about the spelling and pronunciation of Lithian in the beginning of A Case Of Conscience. In the first Superman film, Supes tells Lois that his home planet is Krypton, spelled K-Y-R..., not C-R-I..., although there cannot possibly be a correct spelling of "Krypton" in Roman letters as yet.

With Flandry, I think that the answer must be that some Terran scholar has transliterated Eriau letters into the Roman alphabet but that his efforts were inadequate and therefore have to be modified further just as the Chinese word written as "Tao" in English is pronounced "Dao."