Why Don't Christians refer to god as yahweh

[Aractus]

OT/NT naming is basically weird.

That point I do not agree with but we can come back to it later...

As I understand it Jesus was actually Joshua - why they couldn't use that name I have no idea.

This was going to be my other point, that "we" redily use 'Jesus' as opposed to 'Joshua' or 'Yoshua'/'Yesus'/'Yeshua' (more "correct" pronunciation of Heb./Grk./Arm.) And also that three times in the NT translators "change" 'Iēsous' to Joshua (Lk 3:29, Acts 7:45, Heb 4:8), and the remainder of the time it's "changed" to 'Jesus'. I only say changed in as much as it's not directly transliterated although 'Jesus' is a pretty close transliteration of the Greek.

The bit in Matthew that says "and he shall be known as Emmanuel," is weirder still - as it doesn't appear he ever was.

Incorrect.

Immanuel, meaning "God [is] with us". it is literally stating that Jesus is deity, and will be called as such. John 20:28 is one such obvious example.

The Yahweh bit is deliberately written in Hebrew without vowels precisely so you can't actually say it. Its all to do with the instruction to never take the lord's name in vain.

Rubbish. Hebrew was a spoken language, and didn't have vowels in written form until the time of the Masorites - by which time it was largely a written language and no longer a spoken language. The Masorites put the vowel points in, and that's where we get the rendering "Jehovah". That's as an approximate transliteration, a more accurate rendering would be "Yehowah".

A number of Biblical scholars are convinced that the vowel points over the Tetragrammaton are not for it but rather are from Adonai, but as I already said in my previous post, they ignore the fact that the closest Hebrew name in the Bible to YHWH is YHWDH and it has exactly the same vowel points over it, and has been transliterated into Greek, so it's a rather flimsy assumption, along with the fact that it would mean that the Jewish people had to "forget" how to say the name of God, which itself seems dubious because there are a number of early sources which talk about it, including Josephus - all of this has to be ignored in order to change the vowels from what was written in the 9th century to something different that transforms "Ye•ho•wah" to "Yah•way".

Even the pseudonym Adonai is written in a way that's impossible to pronounce and even then Jews don't take risks with that one and when practising or teaching prayers they use Ashem to replace Adonai.

That's an entirely different discussion.