Of course I have. Trillions of times.
Auschwitz is another example of all this. The city is usually spelled Oświęcim nowadays, even in German.
I didn’t know about those. A.C. Milan and Juventus were two other British formed clubs. It was British railway workers that, at about the same time as soccer had formalised its rules in the 1860’s that took the game around the world as they were (at the time) the world leaders in the railway industry. I probably associate it more with more with South American teams, particularly Argentinian ones: River Plate, Newell’s Old Boys, Racing Club, and the lesser known Douglas Haig.
“Beijing” makes no sense if you want English speakers to pronounce it as close to the Chinese pronunciation as possible. We should be spelling it as “Peiching.”
One thing I never could grok was the “q” situation, i.e. why, how and wherefor any Westerner could think “Hmm, that “tch/tj” sound doesn’t really have an equivalent in my language, how should I write it down… I know ! Q ! Perfect”
To this day it sticks in pinyin (the official way to write Chinese using Roman characters) and it’s annoying because speakers who don’t speak Chinese nor know that about pinyin invariably pronounce those errant Qs as hard Ks. So you always hear about the “King” dynasty…
Well, I think that reflects on the same point I was making. Pinyin is for native speakers of Chinese, not for native speakers of English. It was a mistake to adopt Pinyin as the standard for Chinese words in English.
Really? Trillions of times. Huh, I had no idea. I mean, I hear it now and then, but . . . trillions? Seriously? Maybe it’s the company you keep?
In Yiddish, the city is Oświęcim, but the concentration camp is Auschwitz. I think that at the time of the second WW, Jews from Poland actually referred to the camp as Oświęcim, unless they were speaking German to their captors, but convention has led to the camp being universally called by its German name, “Auschwitz.” A lot of Americans I know pronounce it OSH-wits.
Which Western listener? How is the word “Moslem” pronounced in English? How was it pronounced when English speakers first began writing it down? What makes you think that the pronunciation of “Moslem” and “Muslim” in English is or ever was substantially different?
I think your speculative scenario is significantly oversimplifying the process of transliteration and orthography of foreign loanwords in a non-phonetic language like English.
kayaker: whooooosh!! 
Another Pacific example: The capital of Guam in the native Chamorro language is Hagåtña. It was named Agaña by the Spanish, then when taken over by the US in 1898 the Americans simply ignored the tilde and called it “Agana” for a century (though locals knew to keep using the ñ sound). Then in 1998 the Guam Legislature officialized the Hagåtña spelling for both English and Chamorro documents. Many Western publications I’ve seen still just print “Hagatna”, though, apparently not feeling it worth the bother to look up the code. The island itself has the native name of Guåhån, which in modern Spanish would be transcribed as “Guaján”, but during colonial time had drifted into Guam.
But the problem’s the same the other way around, one presumes - Chinese speakers going out into Western countries and talking about Don Tsichotte or flying Tsantam 
If they’re writing in Chinese for other Chinese-speaking people, they should do it that way.
As RNATB says, “Bombay” is from Portuguese “Bom Bahia,” who founded and named the city. “Mumbai” was the Marathi pronunciation. A lot of native Bombayites—especially the non-Marathi population—still call it “Bombay.” Bombay is only about 40 percent Marathi-speaking (as a primary language). The rest speak Gujarati (about 20 percent), Bambaiya Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, English, etc.
“Koran” and “Musselman” come from the Bengali and Hindi-Urdu pronunciations of those words. There’s no reason why English must base its transliterations on the Arabic versions when they didn’t come into English directly from Arabic.
How about Infidels?
Thanks! The % depends how you count, others find more like 65-70% ‘Sino Korean words’ not weighted by usage. Weighted by usage it’s lower, but in informal or tech talk English loan words are used a lot now so it’s unclear if indigenous words are ever a majority, again depending how you count (does the verb ‘hada’ after a Chinese word to indicate verb form of the word count as an indigenous word? etc).
Also those %'s don’t include ‘indigenous’ words which have a Chinese derivation but whose pronunciation has drifted away from the modern Korean pronunciation of the original Chines characters, and so are never written in Chinese characters. For example the word for a very Korean thing, kimchi, is often viewed as a purely indigenous word but isn’t. It originally derived from 沈菜 soak-vegetable, which would have been pronounced timchae in Korean at one time, though now those characters would be pronounced chimchae. Timchae morphed to dimchae (which is a brand name of special kimchi refrigerators) then kimchi. There are many other examples. The ‘Sino-Korean’ words in the 60-70% OTOH is limited to words pronounced the same way now as their component characters are pronounced now.
OTOH some ‘Sino-Korean’ words were coined by the Koreans and many by the Japanese. Some are also used in modern Chinese, others aren’t. Many terms for modern/western things of the 19th-early 20th century (in politics, science, industry, warfare, etc) are the same pair of Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean, sometimes in Chinese too. Those words were usually coined in Japanese.
I agree; I still use Wade-Giles transliterations wherever possible because they’re easier for native English speakers (including me) to read and pronounce.
Kimtsu, see posts #9 (mine) and #13 (Johanna’s) in this thread regarding the pronunciation and transliteration of the name Osama/Usama. That’s kind of what I was getting at.
I did find a place to look up Egyptian Arabic vocabulary specifically … and it appears in that dialect, they pronounce “Muslim” pretty much like it would be pronounced in Classical Arabic (no “Moe-slame” or anything like that).
Up until sometime in the early 20[sup]th[/sup] century the nation of Japan was transliterated by the West as ‘Nippon’. I believe that the Japanese still spell it this way when using the Latin alphabet in their country. This is why along with the derogatory term ‘Jap’ there is also the older derogatory term ‘Nip’…
At the risk of hijacking the thread, the term “Jap” isn’t automatically considered derogatory outside the US. There was a thread about it a few years ago, IIRC.
“Nip”, on the other hand, is widely regarded as derogatory and has been for a long time, from what I can tell.
It sometimes all of my strength to not give in to the Snark Side and play nice. 