On the First Day of Hanukkah, YouTube gave to me a lesson in phonetic spelling:

Notes: In Hebrew the spelling of the holiday is consistent. But Hebrew uses a different alphabet than English and all the Romance languages. So when going from one alphabet to another, you ‘transliterate’. That is, you spell the word phonetically using the letters of the new alphabet. However, there is no consistency in phonetic spelling — it’s just whatever feels right to the individual. Some spellings do get used more often than others, but none are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, and as the song humorously points out, in Spain, beginning the word with a ‘silent J’, as in the name ‘Julio’, wouldn’t be ‘wrong.’ Unusual – yes.