>Hey Frank
>
>I don't speak Irish (Gaelic) - can't even read the words, as the spelling bears no resemblance to any use of the Roman alphabet that I know of ( e.g. the name pronounced "shevorn" is spelt something like "Siobhaun" or some such - no doubt Dragan will have something to say on Serbian/Croatian/Hungarian spelling).

Was I summoned?

OK, first off, in Serbian/Croatian, Slovenian and Macedonian languages the word "spelling" doesn't exist. The closest is "how is that written", and it's applied only to foreign words. Any native (or foreign domesticated) word is written phonetically. The set of sounds available in the language (30 or so) is mapped 1:1 to the alphabet. The Latin version (applicable to all but Macedonian) has three pairs (lj, nj, dž) which are single characters in Cyrillic, though. The cyrillic (applicable to all but Slovenian, even though the Croatian would probably complain about this sentence) is strictly 1:1 to the sounds. Whoever knows the sounds, can learn to read or write in half an hour - provided the knowledge of one of the alphabets beforehand. The rules for reading fit one page.

For other languages that I know of, Russian, Hungarian, German, Italian - the rules for reading can fit two printed pages with examples. There are special pairs or even triplets (dzs in Hungarian stands for j, or tsch in German for ch), but these can still be learned in a few hours.

For French, I'm too dizzy to have any conclusion. Maybe the reading can be learned in a week, but writing...

For English, I'm pretty much OK with writing (because I write using the words I know :); reading is a different matter. There are often so many ways to read a word you have never heard spoken, and I've given up trying to guess how should such a word be pronounced, because almost each time I had an "i" pronounced as "e" (as in "it") instead as "eye" or vice versa; any "u" can be "uh" or "ewe", and sometimes even "?" (insert the proper characters which would be read as short "u" as in "butcher" - I don't know of any) depending; any "gh" can be pronounced as "g", "f", ""; a "ch" can be "k", "ch", "sh" or maybe something else; any "h" may be pronounced or not; ... like I already said, anything goes, or goesn't.