So Wales is a bi-lingual country, right?

[thewayne]

Which means its street signs are in both English and Undecipherable With Less Than 10% Vowels, right?

And what's the worst that could happen if you were to email a new highway sign's text to your translator and they're out on vacation and have an auto-responder set up and you don't know Welsh?

It must be seen to be believed (and snickered at).

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/11/welsh-road-sign.html

Comments

[vaudy.livejournal.com]

That's hilarious.

From what little I know of Welsh, "y" pretty much always functions as a vowel, not a consonant, and "w" frequently functions as a vowel, as well; at least, it does so when it's surrounded by other consonants. So Welsh doesn't really use fewer vowels, so much as it simply uses different letters as vowels from what we expect.

My English icon is perhaps not the most appropriate, but it's the only linguistics-themed icon I have.