We have 43 sounds, or phonemes, in English and thousands of ways to spell them. We are NOT a phonetic language - I feel sorry for anyone who has to learn to write this language.  There are 4x the dyslexics for English speakers than for phonetic languages, like Spanish, Italian etc.   George Bernard Shaw once said you could spell "Fish"  G-H-O-T-I   GH - from "enough" O - from "women" TI - from "elation"   How did English get to be such a major world language with our horrible non-phonetic spelling?  Beats the poo outta me!! Pauline Costianes, who loves Italian best, even though  I'm Greek