I enjoy looking at paintings, but I have no desire to paint. That impulse isn't in me, and I wouldn't be any good at it without it - Arika Okrent

English is also very prolific borrower of words from other languages, but that's not entirely to blame for the inconsistencies

The vowel system was undergoing a big change, and we were just bringing English back into written form again after it had been basically out of written form for a couple hundred years

No one takes as many pages as English to explain all the exceptions, all the irregularities, and it's really the matching of the spelling to the pronunciation that causes a huge headache for learners of the language