Hebrew script ... and transliterations

#3: Any branch as far as I am concerned. It's pronounced oogle-bulg by the way (like google and bulk).

Netanyahu's name is Binyamin, which is rendered Benjamin in the English-language Bible. Presumably because Benjamin is a familiar name to English speakers, he is sometimes referred to as Benjamin.

It wouldn't surprise me if he had gone by Benjamin during the five or six years he lived in the US; and perhaps he continued to introduce himself to English speakers that way.

His brother Yonatan, killed at Entebbe in 1976, is often called Jonathan in English, including in the subtitle of a biography by the other brother Iddo: Entebbe: A Defining Moment in the War on Terrorism—The Jonathan Netanyahu Story. But Jonathan was born in New York (unlike the sabra PM).

Happy birthday to the Prime Minister, by the way.

Checking dates etc, I just learned that Yonatan Netanyahu was a high school classmate of Reggie Jackson in the Philadelphia suburbs. (Baseball hero of the 1970s; "Mr October".)

#9 - thanks for that. Is it still spelled Cosmopolitan, though?

And others - especially Shuffaluff - many thanks for the explanations/examples.

Now .......
Although this is the SiT branch, language is a construct. So are symbols. In fact, you could say all language is symbolic, especially when it comes to the written form.

So - as I'm having some problems assimilating combining the letter J in all of the three Abrahamic religions:
The Jewish religion has the Star of David, the Christian religion has the Cross, and Islam has the Crescent Moon.
Can anyone come up with a nice bold graphic symbol which neatly encapsulates the three?

Google came up with this.

Oh, that's great. Many thanks, Shuffaluff.

In Spanish, the ll which is pronounced y in Mexican and many other dialects, is pronounced dzh in Colombia, and zh in Argentina. A Chilean friend, who today speaks excellent English, told me after a year or two of being in England that to his ear dzh, zh and y were "same thing", which is why he tended to call people with the English name John interchangeably Dzhon and Yon without really noticing he was doing it.

Yes, the correct spelling of "ogle-bulg" is still "cosmopolitan". The similarity is very obvious, isn't it? Of course you can always go with the full name, but that is more for the mathematically inclined.

PS #16: Dzongkha (or Latinised Jonkha), the national language of Bhutan, is very similar to your example "Dzhon". For example "dzong" meaning fortress and pronounced with a J as in the English John.

Cosmo - I think I love you. ;.D