>>Cheers Srdjan.
>>
>>How DO you pronounce your name, phonetically, BTW? I suppose the "j" is "y" but there's no vowel in the first syllable.
>>
>>:-)
>
>Sir John would be the closest :).
>
>R is a vowel when surrounded by consonants, at least in South Slavic languages - and I've caught a few Russian words of the kind (their word for mercury, for one). Just listen to TV for a while until you hear how they pronounce Srbija (Serbia), Hrvatska (Croatia), Crna Gora (Montenegro), srce (heart), drvo (tree) etc etc.
>
>And there's no such thing as "dj" - it should be "đ", pronounced pretty much like Italian "gi". There are more than a dozen words where "dj" should be read as "d-j" (i.e. two distinct consonants, not as one đ), plus hundreds of words where accented "de" becomes "dje" in iyekavian dialect, and "đe" in yekavian. The spelling of đ as dj is used when you're using a bad character set - i.e. Ascii or a foreign typewriter.

As I audio-pictured it then :-)