Page "Alphabet" Paragraph 53

At the other extreme are languages such as English, where the spelling of many words simply has to be memorized as they do not correspond to sounds in a consistent way.

For English, this is partly because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was established, and because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels.

Even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time ; rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a higher failure rate.