>>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?

The thread has a tree structure. Just go upwards to message #1194472 - don't fork anywhere.

>>Aj juzd tu hev e stjudent bas-pes ven aj vent tu gremar skul.
>>
>>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.

I've had that text in my hands in 1990 - while we didn't have full Web access until 1996, such tidbits found their way through academic network. And it was attributed to Mark Twain then, and I've found it a couple more times over the years, also attribut(ari)ed to him.

Though, I was emjuzd only by the first half of it - somewhere around the middle he begins making the case against phonetic English, applying reductio ad absurdum (still funny, but not amusing anymore) just to show what sort of chaos would follow.

Nowadays, I think it's impossible to have any reform of English - it's too widespread as is, and any body trying to change it would be summarily shot by those who like it as it is.