I’m envious of that, to be honest. Non-phonetic spelling is one of the greatest barriers to learning a language like English.
Part of the problem though is what this comic highlights, where English does not often try to adapt names and loanwords to its own phonetics. They are transliterated to the Latin alphabet in ways that make sense for the logic of the source language, and then just carried into English.
And then it just happens that the history of the English language is characterized by the number of times Britain was invaded by speakers of other languages that just merged into the lexicon, so English is riddled with loanwords that are each informed by the logic of their languages of origin.
I’m envious of that, to be honest. Non-phonetic spelling is one of the greatest barriers to learning a language like English.
Part of the problem though is what this comic highlights, where English does not often try to adapt names and loanwords to its own phonetics. They are transliterated to the Latin alphabet in ways that make sense for the logic of the source language, and then just carried into English.
And then it just happens that the history of the English language is characterized by the number of times Britain was invaded by speakers of other languages that just merged into the lexicon, so English is riddled with loanwords that are each informed by the logic of their languages of origin.