To the contrary of most people, I think that English spelling is actually excellent because the spelling tells you less about actual phonology than etymology, and from there you can derive the pronunciation, thus the script is able to accomodate the accurate representations (phonologically) of every word from every language. There is no other language where people care about the correct pronunciation of words, because in most other languages the realm of possibility for the representation of sounds is extremely limited (take, for example, Hindi, with its supposedly phonetic script). Whereas Roman script can represent the accurate pronunciation of every word in Hindi, the Devanagari cannot even come close to representing all English words, not even all words written in Roman--which is probably why Roman script is becoming a dominant writing system in South Asia.