The standard joke is that English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat, which go around beating up other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary and spare grammar. This is funny because it's true.

Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow never gotten.

> English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other

To give an example, number words are often covered 3 times in English - one from English (Germanic?) roots, one from Latin roots, and one from Greek roots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_prefix#Table_of_number...

  one / uni / mono
  two / bi / di
  three / ter / tri
  four / quad / tetra

Other examples include: A dentist works on your teeth, a canine is a dog, the meat from a cow is beef, a foreword is a preface.

The monkey's paw curls a finger: "Today Donald Trump announced a new initiative to teach all children a new AI-normalized language known as Americish. All English signage will be replaced with Americish."

Absolutely tremendous! rocks out on invisible accordion

The sibling comments are good answers. Another factor is the fact that written English goes back a long time. In some cases, pronunciation has drifted over time, but the spelling didn't change. The silent k's in words like knight and knife were not always silent, for example, but you have to go back to old English for them to be pronounced.

Donald Knuth bucks the trend by insisting the KN to both be pronounced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

this somehow reminds me of niklaus wirth who supposedly said that you can call him by name or by value.

> where you read exactly what you say and you say exactly what you read

surely there are regional accents of Standard Italian where different people say the same word different ways though, right? Does everyone speak it the same way and save variation for their local dialect?

There are dialects, but they are more similar to different languages rather than different pronunciations. For instance dialect of Piedmont, my region, are somehow similar to French, because of geography and history.

It's common for people of one area to not understand dialects from a very different area, but the language is one, and you pronounce all the letters (almost, there are some exceptions, but they follow a rule), and if you were to write the dialect you'd write anything you say.

There are many variations on the cadence and on how some words are used, but generally speaking the language is the same everywhere. But then, of course, Italy is a small Country and only a few millions people speak Italian.

I wasn't hinting that one language is better than others, just that it comes very natural to us to read that alphabet. Once you map in your head some signs to some sounds it's almost all there (provided that you know enough English to infer which words are written for enough time to learn the missing signs).

Another factor is, sometimes different forms of words have different pronunciations (because of the phonology of English), but often the same spelling: compare "electric" where the final "c" has a hard K sound, and "electricity", where he same "c" has an S sound. The pronunciation change is predictable, but the spelling retains continuity between the two pronunciations. It breaks the idea of 1-to-1 relationships between sounds and spellings, but in these kinds of situations, I think it's a good thing.

Because we nicked so many words from so many different other languages, and kept (to some extent) their so many different spellings and pronunciations.