Being from Lithuania I noticed that too. These old English words sound just as if some Lithuanian student would be reading English text for the very first time

Being from Lithuania I noticed that too. These old English words sound just as if some Lithuanian student would be reading English text for the very first time and uttered each letter just how it was meant to sound in Lithuanian. I suspect that over-time English, for some reason, lost the correspondence between the pronunciation and writing of their language. For example in Lithuanian I cannot think of a world where someone would have trouble reading the word after seeing how its spelled. Also, interestingly, we don't have "spelling bee" type competitions here.