It's also that french and german have somewhat purer linguistic roots, english started as a west germanic language, got admixtures of old norse, followed by mas

It's also that french and german have somewhat purer linguistic roots, english started as a west germanic language, got admixtures of old norse, followed by massive injections of french and latin (roughly a quarter of the modern vocabulary, each), and uncontrolled pronunciation shifts. Written old english was quite regular and phonetically sound. It also had a fair number of diacritics (after latinisation). > For any "real" language it's probably impossible to have a 1-1 mapping in both directions. I understand korean is rather good in that perspective, but also that it has a relatively simple phonology and the korean script is constructed, it was designed from scratch for korean. Interestingly and not dissimilar to TFA's assertions, for a very long time it was only used by the common class and disdained by the aristocracy, 19th century nationalism and separation from china led to its revival.