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.

Wikipedia seems to back me up slightly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refor...

Any linguists fancy putting me straight on this?