[guitarbill]

This is a good comment, but slightly complicated and took my a while to figure out what you were saying. I think your point is that he said "alphabet" but meant "language".

Basically, you can't really figure out English pronunciation from the way a word is written at all, because English isn't phonetic (e.g. Polish and polish, and many, many more).

For phonetic languages, the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is close to perfect (i.e. words are pronounced the way they are spelt [or spelled - wtf English]) - but only for the sounds in that language. Hence it may be possible to transliterate most English word to Devanagari. Most famously, e.g. English into Japanese doesn't work, even though Japanese itself is also phonetic but is e.g. missing the 'r' sound. The reverse is also true, unless you use extra punctuation to signify syllable boundaries or stress. E.g. Asakusa is 浅草 Asa-kusa and thus the stress changes and it's pronounced AsaKSA, not ASAkusa. I guess you could also transliterate it close enough with asaxa and people would probably get the stress right, further proof than English isn't the best tool for this.

(I think all the explanation of the previous paragraph is encompassed by "phonemes", which I had to google and still don't quite understand.)

The only "language" that can handle transliteration of any language is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which isn't a language because it doesn't have grammar or vocabulary or really anything except well-defined glyphs/symbols and the corresponding pronunciation.