I agree Jon. And disagree, Nigel - I'm not much of a linguist (a keen amateur philologist, yes), but I have picked up a little bit. You're not making sufficient allowance for the way in which sounds morph across languages. Or perhaps you know even less than I! ;-) There's a whole thing, for example, about the way that Persian names are written & pronounced in Ancient Greek. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to explain the technicalities, but take the well known name Xerxes. That's the Greek version. In modern English, it's generally spelt something along the lines of Khshayarsha.

Which is a bit of a mouthful! ;-) The point is that the Greeks couldn't necessarily wrap their tongues around, and didn't have the letters to represent, some of the sounds that were part of the Persian language, so they said / wrote it as near as they could. Consider your own (I think it was you) explanation some years back & above of how to pronounce 'll'. To a born Welsh speaker, you don't even think about it, to a non-Welsh speaker...

Some sounds are very malleable across tongues, especially related tongues, vowels particularly. 'Ah' doesn't become 'oo', but I can still see a relation between the phonetic Welsh you've given & the French. Many consonantal sounds also easily morph. B & P, D & T, T & Z (perhaps surprisingly, but consider the 'ts' of tsar), V & W, M & N, and many etceteras. I think it has something to do with where the sound is shaped in the mouth (I'm sure you understand what I mean). I know only a little of linguistics but even with your phonetic renderings, yes, I can still see some quite close similarities in pronunciation.