That would be strange, since the same phenomenon - linguistic drift away from ancient spellings - is observed in every language. The reason you see other langua

That would be strange, since the same phenomenon - linguistic drift away from ancient spellings - is observed in every language. The reason you see other languages as having spelling that is "less weird" than English is not that English is different from those other languages - it's that the spelling of those other languages is much more recent than the spelling of English is. The Norman contribution to the split between tough, through, and dough, for example, is zero.