I think you would be a fan of these two guys [1] [2] who championed phonemic spelling. And in fact, Vuk is credited with getting Yugoslav writing to be phonemi

I think you would be a fan of these two guys [1] [2] who championed phonemic spelling. And in fact, Vuk is credited with getting Yugoslav writing to be phonemic. A common phrase used in Croatia to describe how to write something is to write it "by the Wolf" (since vuk = wolf), indicating that it is supposed to be read as written. This leads to transliterating foreign words in a phonetic manner where one doesn't need to know a particular foreign language to pronounce the word correctly. From your example, to write water "by the Wolf" we would write "votr." :-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christoph_Adelung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christoph_Adelung [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87