As a Finnish speaker, I must disappoint you that both Russian and English do have broken alphabets (although this might not affect their character coding). English makes extensive use of silent letters and letters whose pronunciation is dependent on the context (word) they appear in (take e in "context" and "appear" as an out of hat example). I haven't studied much Russian, but I know that the letter ъ in their alphabet is never pronounced, and instead used to modify the pronunciation of the preceding letter.
English pronunciation leads to algorithms like Soundex [1], which just wouldn't seem necessary if words were written purely phonetically. Hangul gets closer, in a way. It seems hard to make rhymes with words like 'reprise' and avoid 'despise'. Not all languages need to be so ambiguous.
You really don't want a writing system which is too tied to pronunciation. If you go too far in that direction you'll end up with people with different dialects of the same language not being able to communicate clearly, even in writing! That would be a very undesirable state of affairs.
Yet you still want some correlation between spelling and pronunciation, otherwise the writing system essentially becomes completely arbitrary and thus impossible to learn (since we humans rely so much on pattern recognition for learning).
I am from country with strongly phonetical language and you are just plainly wrong. There are minor dialects but it is considered rather as slang in compare to language taught in schools or comunicate with officials or even broader audience.
(On the other side, it is much more difficult for us to learn English and get used to that disconection between alphabet and said words. And we don't have spelling competitions :).)
I am not wrong. My native country did this experiment about 200-300 years ago -- it failed badly, and that was with a very small population which was (geographically) widely distributed.
Trying to read (as schoolchildren) a few samples of text written in different dialects during that time dispelled any notion that it was a good idea.
Also: China (as another poster pointed out).
EDIT: Btw, if you have a good grasp of English accents, it's pretty easy to see what kind of chaos would occur in a country as small as England. (Thinking of the "north south divide" thing.)
So how does Finnish compare up? Do you not have silent letters?
In Dutch we have some useless things like combined letters: "c" and "h" are both used (like in "cake" or "hotel") but when combined to "ch" they sound like a "g". There are even duplicate ones: "au" and "ou" are both the same sound, and "ij" and "ei" too. You can't mix them though, "ijs" is ice and "eis" is a demand even though they sound 100% the same. I'm not sure about silent letters though, the "h" is audible even if only slightly.
Interesting to see Dutch mentioned. From what little I know about Dutch, its orthography does seem more similar to English than any other non-english-derived language I've seen.
I seem to remember that some (clearly not all!) of the horrible mess of English orthography originates from Dutch in fact, since some of the first people to run printing presses in England (or to print books which were distributed in England) were Dutch.
This may be true from a pronunciation standpoint, but he's mostly writing from a text processing standpoint. From a text processing standpoint, Russian and English are pretty easy to deal with.
On the other hand, it's a bit funny to point those out as easy to deal with, because they are bicameral alphabets, with notions of upper and lower case, case mappings, title casing rules, and the like. That's a complex system, that if you didn't grow up with it and already have had to deal with and come to terms with it, you would probably include it in a rant like this.
Yup, both ъ and ь either modify the preceding constant (тварь) or insert a sort of separation between letters (подъезд).
There are also some non-phonetic aspects to the language, which I didn't really think about until taking Russian in college (sort of native speaker, took the class to make some friends.) For instance, "o" is frequently pronounced as "ah" (хорошо - horosho - is usually pronounced as 'harasho'.)
