[Kenny Bunk]

shampane" for "champagne" or "boorreeto" for "burrito" do we?

Not a fair comparison as those words are already in the Latin alphabet in their native language. It would be interesting to see how the Turks transliterate Arabic.

[zimdog]

Fair enough.

I'm sure there are examples from Russian or Greek, but I don't know either of those languages well, and they are both inflected languages, so the cases used in English-language writing are not the only forms of the words in their native surroundings.

"Cremlin"?

"Krouchetchev"?

"Kryste"?

Hebrew isn't transliterated correctly either. (There are as many ways to spell the name of the festival of lights as there are days in the festival itself)

[XBob]

224-" shampane" for "champagne" or "boorreeto" for "burrito" do we?

Not a fair comparison as those words are already in the Latin alphabet in their native language. It would be interesting to see how the Turks transliterate Arabic."

Interesting point, especially since modern Turkish language was itself transliterated only recently - in the 1920's-30's.

In addition, written arabic is not the same as spoken arabic. Written arabic is 'classical' arabic from the days of the koran, and has not been allowed to change appreciably.