[Lyaer]

From what I understand, it is a Germanic language with a pretty heavy French influence. That might help explain some of the irregularities in spelling and pronunciation, since your joining different families, and French especially seems to have a pretty convoluted spelling system (though I have heard it is pretty logical once you understand it). British empire probably subjected itself to an above average number of sources for loanwords, too. And you have the old elites' obsession with Greek and especially Latin. My anthro professor also told me that English is more flexible than a lot of other languages (probably related to above?), which will also lead to irregularities.

But the fact is, this sort of stuff happens in every language. I was taking Japanese a while back, which phonetically is a lot more uniform than English, but there are words like "haku" for instance. I think that's the one. I think it means both "bridge" and also "box" or something (different kanji). Might be off. But I remember that the two meanings have slightly different pronunciations that are in no way indicated by their phonetic spellings. Also things like the "ha" particle pronounced "wa" and all that. It's because you have a lot of different people in different communities making up words, borrowing them from other languages, developing their own abbreviations, linguistic styles, et cetera. Even if you start with a perfect language invented by computers, it is going change over time, and as it does, it will inevitably lose some degree of internal consistency.

EDIT: Oh gees that's a lot of preemptions. There were no replies when I started.