I think the cause of a lot of the bizarre spelling in English is the "Great Vowel Shift" - basically, sometime between 1350 and 1700, most uses of most long vow

I think the cause of a lot of the bizarre spelling in English is the "Great Vowel Shift" - basically, sometime between 1350 and 1700, most uses of most long vowels changed their pronunciation. Obviously (because this is English), the change didn't apply universally, but it applied widely enough to move our pronunciation out of sync with the European languages it was derived from. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift for more detail.