Most of English's inconsistent spelling came about from (sometimes incomplete) pronunciation shifts. Now knight and night are homophones where they once weren't, and while sky still rhymes with by, it no longer rhymes with archery. Fixing this is difficult, not just because people are resistant to change, but also because the variations in accents.
However, we're also introducing a lot of new inconsistencies due to a relatively recent shift to adopting foreign words without changing the spelling or pronunciation as we would have in the past - something no other language does. This forces English readers to learn multiple foreign orthographies and English's to read English.
The British are sometimes better about it. They see the word "jalapeno" or "tortilla" and pronounce it like you'd expect (and get mocked for it) with English's orthography, as opposed to forcing everyone to use Spanish orthography to pronounce them halapenyo and tortiya.
Having spent quite a bit of time among the British dialect speaking population, one of the things that stood out was the systematic and unapologetic anglicization of obviously foreign words. It was very regular and obvious, which has significant benefits, but the practice was different than I am used to with American English.
In the US, words of Spanish origin are commonly pronounced according to Spanish rules, reflecting that a significant percentage of the US population has a passing familiarity with Spanish for historical reasons. This is expected as an American dialect speaker. You see the same, to a lesser extent, for French. Americans in many parts of the US code-switch pronunciation to reflect the origin of the word without thinking about it. People will poke at you a bit if you don’t know the pronunciation of foreign words. But that is far from universal among English dialects. It was a noticeable difference with UK English aside from the dialectical differences that everyone is familiar with.
I’m not making a value judgment, it is just an interesting example of differences in English dialects that go beyond the language. In my experience, North Americans tend to hold truer to the original pronunciation of foreign words even as they butcher English with their regional variations. North Americans, by and large, are oblivious to it. I only noticed by spending a lot of time among native English speakers on other continents.
I have never once heard anyone pronounce the ‘l’s in ‘tortilla’ as if it was a Germanic word. And if anything, I hear people hypercorrect and insert ‘ñ’ where it shouldn’t (It’s not ‘habañero’, dammit) more than I hear them drop it from ‘jalapeño’.
I say we should double down and say ‘English is no longer phonetic. There are 26 symbols which are arranged into words arbitrarily, and you just have to learn every reading by rote.’
Every sentence should be like trying to read: ‘Siobhan Llewellyn-Nguyen ate the jalapeño and dulce de leche gyōza that she kept in her Versace bag alongside an unopened bottle of Moët-flavoured weißbier.’
All those non-English words you used do actually come from languages with phonetic alphabets (albeit only in one direction for French).
And while English spelling is inconsistent an educated native speaker can often pronounce newly-seen words with decent accuracy based on previous encounters with similar words so it’s not completely arbitrary.
English spelling gives you a pretty good idea of a word’s origin, which gives you a hint to its pronunciation. And this phenomenon of importing foreign words unchanged is hardly new so I think it’s something most native speakers would be familiar with.
Personally I really like English’s spelling. I like being able to look at a word and have a good idea of what its origin is, I think it adds something to the language. Reading English is like looking back through time. I understand the arguments for phoneticisation but I really think we would lose something great in the process.
> Fixing this is difficult, not just because people are resistant to change, but also because the variations in accents.
The relevance of accents is greatly overstated. The argument is of the form "we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and therefore it's impossible". There are a great many words in English whose pronunciation is irregular: these are the ones we should fix. For these, accent is irrelevant; you can pronounce your r's hard or your a's broad, and it doesn't matter: "bury" is pronounced to rhyme with "merry" in probably every accent of English that's ever been, from Old English (ic byrge vs myrge) on. You could just fix 100 words like "bury" and "could" and "are" whose spellings are either wrong or etymological but don't reflect extant variants, and the spelling would be reformed, children's lives would be improved, and it wouldn't be a problem from any perspective of accent variation or etymology or anything.
> "bury" is pronounced to rhyme with "merry" in probably every accent of English that's ever been
I've definitely heard speakers for whom "bury" rhymes with "furry", and that's without the "Merry–Murray merger" (i.e., the same person would pronounce "berry" to rhyme with "merry" and quite distinctly from "bury".)
> You could just fix 100 words like "bury" and "could" and "are" whose spellings are either wrong or etymological but don't reflect extant variants, and the spelling would be reformed, children's lives would be improved, and it wouldn't be a problem from any perspective of accent variation or etymology or anything.
In many cases it would take existing homophones and turn them into additional meanings of the same spelling, which would actually reduce clarity and comprehensibility of written text.
However, we're also introducing a lot of new inconsistencies due to a relatively recent shift to adopting foreign words without changing the spelling or pronunciation as we would have in the past - something no other language does. This forces English readers to learn multiple foreign orthographies and English's to read English.
The British are sometimes better about it. They see the word "jalapeno" or "tortilla" and pronounce it like you'd expect (and get mocked for it) with English's orthography, as opposed to forcing everyone to use Spanish orthography to pronounce them halapenyo and tortiya.