the Israeli standard way of romanizing hebrew looks weird to any person whose first language is english. take the Israel city of Petach Tikvah. Assuming you k

the Israeli standard way of romanizing hebrew looks weird to any person whose first language is english. take the Israel city of Petach Tikvah. Assuming you know about the gutural h in hebrew, you know how to pronounce it correctly via that spelling. However, that's not the official transliteration. The official one is Petah Tiqwa. And unless you know that the w should be pronounced like a v, most israelis (perhaps not those of yemenite extraction) will look at you strangely. why transliterated weirdly? my understanding is that its meant to be able to go 1:1 programmatically back and forth between hebrew and english, so you end up with things that look weird to the english trained eye.