It's not quite as cut and dry as that. There are many words in the English language whose spelling is in fact inconsistent with both pronunciation and etymology, often changed by scholars putting their fingers in to make English more like Latin or Greek.
"Debt" is a good example, which was originally spelled "dette" from "dete" in Old French but was erroneously changed in the sixteenth century to bear more similarity to the Latin word debitum. The s in "island" is total bullshit because the word should be spelled iland but was also changed to make it more like the Latin word insula, which isn't even related. These aren't isolated incidents either; tons of words really do just have extra letters for the sake of having extra letters. More of them did once have a purpose but have long, long since becom
I would on principle be in favor of reform of the English language to make it less ridiculously arbitrary in comparison to the writing systems of many other major languages, but it won't happen for one reason and that is that since spelling became basically codified in the 18th and 19th centuries, and there is no regulatory body which has the authority to officiate changes (unlike
every other one of the 10 most spoken languages on Earth), the adoption problem has long since become insurmountable. It won't happen because the momentum of our current system is too strong and there is widespread complacency from most English speakers, who have a "don't fix it if it ain't broke" attitude.
This is despite the fact that the nonphoeneticism of English isn't actually harmless, either for children learning to read or foreign learners of English.
The rate at which young children learn to read fluently and acquire literary competence in English is noticeably slower compared to children who learn to read in languages with more phoenetic writing systems.
