[Dylan16807]

The pronunciation is so bad though. The consonants are mostly fine, but the way we write vowels is a total mess. We'd need at least a dozen vowel letters to sanely represent English. And we could cut a couple consonant letters to help make room, for maybe 30 letters total, still no accents.

[mcswell]

Blame that on Latin, which had only five vowels (not counting the long and short vowels separately).

[krapp]

Come now. English can be understood well enough through tough thorough thought.

[nneonneo]

Just today the NYT Strands puzzle gave a great example: you can find one set of prefixes that make each of the following rhyme, and a different set of prefixes that make them all sound different:

-ooze -oose -ews -ues -use -oes -uise

You can do this purely with prefixes ending in consonants, i.e. not by turning -use into -ouse, for example.

[nneonneo]

(spoilers for the little -ooze puzzle: for rhymes, booze choose brews blues ruse shoes cruise; for non-rhymes, snooze loose pews plagues obtuse toes guise; many others are possible, and rhyming or lack thereof may depend on accent).