“The relationship between sound and spelling is a nightmare. Our writing system is not phonetic to the point of being anti-phonetic. There are, for instance, at least seven ways of representing what for most people is same vowel sound— “ee”: free, these, leaf, field, seize, key, machine. What do we do?”

from “The Proper Way to Talk” in The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language by Melvyn Bragg