This article feels to me as it was written in bad faith, trying and failing to prove a point, but then positing the point was proved. The author happily start

This article feels to me as it was written in bad faith, trying and failing to prove a point, but then positing the point was proved. The author happily start the article by submitting: >The purpose of this page is to describe [...] the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time. but then they quietly show that with their whole page of rules, the reader will not actually pronounce 85% of the words correctly as they just claimed, but actually less than 60%. By arbitrarily deciding that a number of errors can be considered small, the author bumps the number of "correctly pronounced words" to 85%. Are we talking about 85% of the whole language? No, just 5000 words. Even if they are the most frequent in the written language, they would still only account for around 95% of all the words. The author position is: - people complain about the English spelling all the time, saying it's horrible - the English spelling is actually pretty systematic and this page will explain the rules to understand it - when you will have mastered these rules, you will pronounce half of the words perfectly - for extremely common words such as "give", "get", "real", "very", "put", "half" you are still SOL - the english spelling is not so horrible after all: as a perfect student you will only butcher more than 1 word every 10 spoken To me, the author has proved the point he was trying to disprove. (and in which rule do /ˈsɪŋɚ/ and /ˈfɪŋɡəɹ/ end up?)