There's no debate about it, unless you want to debate what makes a script "phonetic" in the first place.
The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English is not.
Or, in other words, in English individual letters neither represent phonemes nor carry meaning; it's only clumps of letters, or individual words, that have both meaning and pronunciation assigned to them. Unlike in Latin.
It has nothing to do with the spoken language at all. Written English uses a script that has symbols which represent individual phonemes. English uses a phonetic script. Yes, spoken English has diverged from written English. The script is still phonetic.
What the symbols look like is beside the point.
According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.
> No, it doesn't
Yes, it does.
This isn't about the language, it's about the script. English is written with a phonetic script.
> According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.
I said nothing about spoken languages in my comment.
A computer program written with knowledge of a few dozen of the common special cases would pronounce >90% of English words correctly and be close on most of the rest, "cupboard" notwithstanding. Indeed, look at how well 80's-era speech to text did with this exact approach.
If English doesn't use a phonetic writing system, then what kind does it use? Ideographic? Syllabic?
If English was truly phonetic, to name a few examples again: the pronunciation of "are" would most likely be a prefix of "area", since the graphemes for "are" are present in "area"; "read" and "read" would be read the same, since the graphemes for "read" and "read" are identical; the words "freak", "steak", and "break" would end with the same phonemes, since the graphemes for "eak" suffix are identical... and so on.
I now suspect you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a phoneme is.
What does the symbol “c” represent, if not two different phonemes?
The letters in the English script represent sounds. Do you disagree?
In a phonetic language, you can pronounce a word just based on its written representation.
Just compare current and paste tense of read. It is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
You can argue it is an phonetically inconsistent language. However, you will find most of inconsistencies occur in the most frequently used words, making it hard for a beginner.
Even looking up the definition of "alphabetic" shows that that is often for phonetic languages. :D
English is phonetic in that way. Sometimes the phonetics are applied with exception-cases and alternatives.
The former point can be debated. The latter, not. The English script is phonetic. Graphemes represent phonemes.
The English script (its writing system), which is based on the Latin alphabet (the graphic symbols) is phonetic because the symbols represent sounds and have no intrinsic semantic meaning. I think that's fairly un-debatable unless you want to make the case that emoji are part of the English script.
"t" represents a sound in the English script, a phoneme. It does not represent a thing, an idea, or anything more than an aspirated consonant sound.