just a practical question, Russian doesn't have a letter H (or rather, they unwisely decided to make it sound like N :) with the result that Hitler is called Gitler. Is Habr called Gabr? or more like Khabr with the X letter?
It's an old rule from before the 20th century which is not really active anymore. While it's still true for old names due to convention (Harry, etc.), new foreign words with h- in it are now often rendered with kh- (letter Х). Originally, h- was rendered as g- because at one point, the educated pronunciation of "g" was influenced by Kiev's accent (as it was the capital of Rus) which always spells g- as h-. So the closest representation of h- was "the educated G". However, people outside of Ukraine were later misreading g- in such names as "hard G" because they weren't aware of the original pronunciation, hence H => G for old words.
just a practical question, Russian doesn't have a letter H (or rather, they unwisely decided to make it sound like N :) with the result that Hitler is called Gitler. Is Habr called Gabr? or more like Khabr with the X letter?