Well, so far my peace of mind.
A couple of years ago, Michael Wiederkrantz pointed out that I was wrong and that 'Bryssel' is correctly spelled in Swedish. My argument was that the transliteration was wrong because 'Bryssel' is pronounced wrongly, while Brussels would have been pronounced correctly. Of course, I understand a bit Norwegian (but not Swedish), and he probably doesn't speak Flemish, which is more or less the same as Dutch. At the same time I live in Germany, where a 'ü' would be correct and we both communicate with each other in English. So this is somewhat of a Babylonian situation.
Recentely Michael brought his problems up again, but did not allow me to post 'his' arguments after wasting my time on communicating with him. In any case, I answered the following:
Nice of you to point me to the wikipedia article. I'm afraid I stick to my point (which is that it is a wrong transliteration), because I know enough Norwegian to know how 'y' is pronounced and I am a Flemisch native, so I also know how Brussel is supposed to be pronounced. Now, of course, you might not believe that, so I'll show you the differences in prononciation based on the phonetics between the different languages. The swedisch article states: - 'Brussel, uttalas /brɵsəɫ/' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Swedish_and_Norwegian explains how the 'ɵ' is pronounced - nearest english equivalent: 'bird, with tight lips' The flemish prononciation - is found in the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels - 'Brussel, pronounced [ˈbrʏsəl]' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Dutch_and_Afrikaans - nearest english equivalent: 'feet with rounded lips' The problem is of course that people believe the letters 'y' and 'u' are the same, while they are not. In flemish we simply do not have the phoneme corresponding to the Norwegian/Swedish 'y'. That leads to an entire collection of interesting situations. E.g: Lys (light) vs Lus (Louse). Belgian speakers have real problems pronouncing the first one. Of course, it is easy to believe that they are the same but, as these two words indicate, they are not pronounced the same in Norwegian/Swedish. Why should they then be pronounced the same in Flemish ? If you see a Flemish 'u', then that is the same as the norwegian 'u', not the 'y'.