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1. Yes. They went with pinyin instead of, I think, Giles-Wade. The PRC stipulated which transliteration system was obligatory on the rest of the world.
2. Yes. Taiwan doesn't kowtow to Peking. Or Beijing. Same pronunciation, same transliteration problem.
3. Stress on the second syllable. It's "heavy" because it ends in a consonant, and the last syllable is considered 'light' because the final consonant is ignored in the pan-Arabic stress-counting game. In most dialects you pronounce the 'u' very o-like (but short), in standard it's a short 'u' (as in 'rue').
4. Qur'an is fine. Koran was the standard for a long time, since we don't do uvular stops in English, nor do we think of a glottal stop as a real consonant. Then again, the Arabic is "officially" (for scholarly purposes) transliterated "qur'aan" because that final vowel, "aa", is simply longer than "qur'an" would indicate. Because the vowel's long the syllable it's in is heavy even if you ignore the final consonant, so qur'aan is stressed on the second syllable.
It's capitalized because of English capitalization conventions; Arabic doesn't do capital letters, and so the transliteration, strictly speaking, doesn't involve capitals. See (3) for discussion of the short 'u'.
5. Yep. Stress on first syllable.
6. Either's ok. The k is actually single, but consecrated by the traditional spelling in English, as is the h. The 'ch' is a nod to German orthography. English lacks the sound that the 'h' is to represent so we make do. Rather like with the 'k' in "Koran".
7. Good luck with that one. First you have to decide which Hebrew you want, Sephardic or Ashkenazi, because Ashkenazi Hebrew borrows from Yiddish which underwent a German short 'a' > short 'o' sound shift. Then you get to sort out how to represent what's written as a final 'h' in Hebrew, but which isn't pronounced as such. And you have to work out how to render the letter most often rendered as 'ts', but sometimes (with a nod to German) as 'tz', should be. Matsah works, matsa suits me better, but 'matzoh' (since most America Jews are Ashkenazi) and 'matzo' are most commonly seen.
8. I'd go with hzbllh, but that's just me. The h, z, b, ll are not a problem. They are as they are in English, pretty much. The vowel in 'hizba, meaning 'party', is a mess--scholars write 'i', classical Arabic as 'i', most spoken dialects have 'e'. Then there's how to link hizb + allah--classically it should have a -t-, and decline (hizbulla, hizbilla, hizballa, for nominative, genitive, and accusative). Of course, the short 'u' is like the short 'u' in "Muhammed" or "Qur'aan", either a short 'u' or a o-like sound, depending upon whether you're speaking high or low styles. The final h in 'allah' is a dead-ringer for the h in "matzoh"--it's written as a clue that the word ends in an 'a' and transliterated just because it's written. In Arabic (similar to Hebrew), it shows that the word, when declined or linked to a following word starting with a vowel, winds up with a -t-.
Hizbullah for classical and formal Arabic (we don't decline foreign words according to foreign grammatical rules in English) or Hezbollah for low-register or dialect. Pretty much everything else is goofy in some way. Note that there's no option for a ' in the word and anybody that puts one in is simply wrong. "Allah", when spoken in isolation, has to start with a glottal stop (the same ' as in qur'aan), but that's because you can't start a word in Arabic without a consonant. As soon as you have a word in front of 'Allah' that first vowel is trash and there is no consonant. "Wasla" is the grammatical term in Arabic, but Spanish 'sinalefa' works just as well, with a rule to dispense with two vowels back to back.
9. Inuit is a problem. The Yup'ik tend not to like being called Inuit any more than Canadians like being called Americans or Mexicans like being called Spanish. In Canada there are only really Inuit, so "Eskimo" (no longer "Esquimaux") finds a good substitute in "Inuit". In the US, where a lot of Eskimos aren't Inuit, or even speak languages in the same family, it's gauche. Some "progressives" like it because it empowers the Inuit, but since it not only functions as an exonym but an ethnicity-depriving exonym for many other tribes, it's probably not a good catch-all term. Note that "Yup'ik" really needs that '--it shows that the p is glottalized, and not just a p.
10. 'Saddam' has the same kind of problem that qur'aan has, plus a wrinkle I hoped to avoid with 'Muhammed'. It should be "Saddaam", stress on the last syllable because the vowel is long and the syllable is heavy. The 'd' is pronounced long as well, not a short little thing as in English: hit that 'd' and pause on it for a split second longer than you want. However, remember that Arabic doesn't do capitals, so that capital I put in "Saddaam" is to show that it's different from "saddaam": it's an s sound that causes adjacent vowels to become backed in the mouth. So that first 'a' sounds a lot like a East-Coaster's "sod". The final 'aa' is variably like the a in 'sad' or 'father', depending where in the Arabic dialect continuum you are. In Iraq it's going to be more like 'father' than 'sad', but in English it would almost start to sound like 'said'.
It's rather similar to a problem in Muhammed because that 'h' isn't the same h as in "hizbullah", it's made deep in the throat. "Pharyngeal" is the word you want, and English lacks them entirely. Just as we used to conflate q and k into 'k' (Koran/Quran), so we still conflate these two h-like sounds. A scholar would insist on putting a dot under the S in saddaam and the h in Muhammed just to keep it clear. The scholarly alternative "Internet" or ASCII version is to use capitals and ditch the standard capitalization conventions. qur'aan, muHammed, Saddaam, hizbullah. If you're really anal retentive, put dots under the l in "allah", it's the only word in which the l is pharyngealized like the S in Saddaam.
11. Shibboleth is KJV standard. Siboleth is also ok, and you can play with it--double the b, screw around with the final 'th'. Tradition gives it a 'sh' sound, but that's because the standard when the text was codified did so. Then there are variant standards for how to pronounce the final 'th' and vowels. I don't do Hebrew. As for 'ear of corn', I'd say it's an icker or ear of wheat. I'm in the US, where 'corn' cannot easily mean wheat but routinely means 'maize'.
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