Honestly, though, of all languages written with an alphabet (Latin or no), English is the worst when it comes to mapping from writing to pronunciation. Sure, it might better than Chinese, but flaunting it in public looks rather absurd even when comparing to, say, French.

And that's not even comparing to languages with a phonemic orthography (where the mapping from pronunciation to spelling is essentially injective) like Finnish or Turkish (which is also extremely regular in terms of grammmar, I'm told). English is terrible in this regard.

Now try pronouncing Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Worcester, Derby, Edinburgh, Argyll… Granted, the latter two are Gaelic in origin, but it's not like English spelling — especially of place names — is terribly phonetic.

English orthograhpy is in fact widely known for having [less systematicity](http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html) than many of its Indo-European neighbors.