That's not true, there are several languages that are perfectly phonetic in their spelling.Darkcrafter wrote:but we all know that every words still needs to be learnt individually whatever the language it is.
A factor for divergences between spelling and pronunciation is how old literacy in that language is. For example, take Latvian. It basically wasn't written at all until the late 19th century. The literate people there spoke German, so they wrote German. If they needed to transcribe some Latvian words, they used the German rules. With literacy getting more widespread, the need to write the people's language appeared and it's only in 1908 that rules for orthography of Latvian were codified.
Inversely, English literature is very old, in fact older than Modern English, and this has given centuries for text and speech to diverge greatly. That's how you can find poems by Shakespeare that no longer rhyme the way English is spoken now; but they did back when they were first penned.