>>You probably noticed all the signs in Welsh-English too. It tickles me how they take anglicised or latin-based words and spell them welsh, e.g. "ambulance" -> "ambwilans". I used to have a student bus-pass when I went to grammar school. It was for a welsh bus company, Crosville, and the terms & conditions, etc. were in both languages. So the bus pass was a "Tocyn discybl" or something like that. It wasn't till later I realised it's like "token disciple" or "scholar's ticket"
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>That's the "set of coordinates" I was talking about in my previous message upstream in this thread. Every language will adjust foreign stuff to the phonetic tools it has. Here's your third sentence in Serbian phonetic:

Upstream!? Jeez, but which attributary? I couldn't find it. Anyway, the Scholar's Ticket I was referring to: of course, the Romans were WELL into Wales all those centuries ago, and "disciple" comes from Latin for scholar. Token comes from Old English - Old High German though. So one is left to wonder where the Welsh expression comes from.
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>Aj juzd tu hev e stjudent bas-pes ven aj vent tu gremar skul.
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>Obviously, there's no "w", so we approximate it with a (and pronounce as a) vee. And we do hear the "y" when "a" is pronounced as "ay" - we spell it like most of central- and north-european languages, as j.

Once, in Reader's Digest. I read a very amusing article that, I think, lampooned Bernard Shaw'a attempt to phoneticise English. It took you through stage by stage of the intro of new concepts (e.g. get rid of "x" cos that can be "ks", "c" (which can be "k" or "s") is reused as, say, "th") and by the end of the article the passage was almost unintelligible. I wish I could find a web ref to it.

I cink u wud be veri amusd bay it.