[anon291]

I mean, that was easily read.

If you go read old documents, you'll note they spelled English much more phonetically .

It's a fairly modern thing to use these standardized spellings

English is fairly phonetic. There's a few options for each phoneme and a few common words, but the vast majority follow obvious phonetic structures.

[lkbm]

Yes, of course it was easy to read. It was spelled phonetically. That's the point.

Calling English "fairly phonetic" is laughable. In most languages, they don't have spelling bees because they don't understand the concept. How would you not know how to spell the word after someone speaks it?