English is unusually irregular in grammar and in spelling. That's because English is a b*****d language with a long history of linguistic miscegenation behind its irregularities. For example, "ph" sounding "f" in a word tells you that it's derived from Greek (unless you're an American because they dumped the f-ing "ph"), whereas "f" in a long ancient Greek-sounding word means it's probably derived from Latin rather than Greek. That's a useful clue to the meaning of a word you haven't seen before. Another unusual feature of English is that it has an unusually large vocabulary -- not the everyday chatty vocabulary, but the language of well-educated writers. Bigger dictionaries in other words.
So how come Anglophone intellectuals manage this larger vocabulary than other languages? I suspect the etymological clues buried in those annoying irregularities are the clues which tempt literary Anglophones to explore the intricacies of the language. That helps to preserve some of the fine distinctions between similar words, such as the notorious theological pair "homoousios" & "homoiousios". Delve into that to discover that strictly speaking "homophobia" out to mean "fear of the same". There have been many proposals to regularise the spelling of English. That to me would be rather like knocking down half of Stonehenge to speed the traffic on the nearby main road.
