They say...and I Wish They'd Stop It

Mark Twain found the German language maddening. George Bernard Shaw thought English spelling and pronunciation absurd. Well, I don't speak much German and I never could spell worth a damn. So it's all the same to me. However, here's a question that isn't:

Who is it who takes foreign words -- from other alphabets yet  -- and tells us how to pronounce them?

Oh! And gets them wrong.

Just a couple of examples:

Over the years, I have heard the name of a city in China pronounced "peking," "peek-ing," "pay-ping" and, lately "bay-jing." Well, which is it? Have the Chinese changed their pronunciation of this name every decade? We still order peek-ing Duck, but apparently the city's name has moved on. They say.

Next, if Moscow is supposed to be pronounced "Mosco" (like Monaco, I guess, or Texaco), why spell it as though it were a sort of cow? They do.

The sole purpose of taking such words from other alphabets is to give us their proper pronunciation. And yet, whoever it is who has this purely phonetic task of getting it right gets it wrong. Whoever that is is called "They."

I know the identity of highly-paid meteorologists on television who, when their predictions are wrong, never mention, let alone apologize for the fact. I can identify Chris Matthews, whose national TV shows -- not counting repeats -- are a  weekly six-pack of inexcusable bad manners; he predicted a Giuliani presidency in 2008 and a Michelle Bachmann Republican presidential nomination in 2012. That's Chris. Wrong, certainly, but identifiable.

Now that we are becoming more aware of the Middle East, very strange pronunciations show up daily that certainly do not match their spellings. So we can expect more and more of this odd-matching.

But what is the source of all this chop-logic and confusion?

That is to say: who are they?