Thank you all. I think the cell-phone thing is the likely culprit... and I'm glad I'm not alone in having a hard time with these when reading. Perhaps if you grow up using them, you can read them as easily as real words, but us old fogeys just can't seem to keep up...

And I'd forgotten about M N X... what a scrumtious breakfast!

Thread creep alert: you will sometimes see hemendeksz (pronounced hem end ex) on Hungarian menus, yes, it's ham and eggs, spelled phonetically into Hungarian. They also have dzsem - "djem" - for jam. Apparently these don't translate...