Today I Learned

I mean you acknowledged consciously doing that. If you're working on it, then you take into account perspectives other than your own.

Either way, having read the wiki page for it now, my main issue is that there really isn't (in my opinion) a good reason that any language should ever have a spelling that does not match the order of the sounds used to pronounce the word

Hearing that from an English speaker while my native is Finnish is quite amusing.

https://icaltefl.com/dearest-creature-in-creation/

A few opening verses to demonstrate:

Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer

Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain (Mind the latter how it’s written). Made has not the sound of bade, Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.

Etc.

If you look at the international phonetic alphabet, take an English word, like "geography". And it looks like this: dʒiˈɒɡɹəfi.

Contrast that to Finnish ones. Horse , hevonen: ˈheʋonen, peasoup, hernekeitto: ˈherneˌkːei̯tːo.

You can't even tell me an objectively correct way to pronounce "read", because depending on the context I'm thinking of, you might say the wrong one. There's none of that in Finnish, we have like one "phone" (as in specific sound that's "pronunciated", äng-äänne, velar nasal iirc might be mistaken too lazy to check).

See if you took 10 English people, or American English people, whatever, English speakers. Gave them a list of fantasy names no-ones ever heard of, they'd try applying rules to familiar feeling bits, like if the name sounds Latin or French or Spanish, but it'd be subjective and very much guesswork. So you'd get 10 English speakers saying all the males differently, but prolly some would go as the writer intended, seeing how writers often use real life inspiration so we rely on how we know people might pronounce them.

Put 10 Finns there, you'll get exactly the same from everyone. Theyre probably all horribly wrong per the writers intention, but each will say the same thing.

But, that's just the book language, the official version of Finnish. We only got written Finnish 500 years back. Dialects are much older. Growing up I had troubles understanding a lot of the vocabulary my grannies used. And then I grew up a bit more realised lots of it is etymologically from a few hundreds years back from the Swedish influences. Though she's doesn't speak a lick of Swedish. Or didn't, rather. (RIP).

But genuinely within 150 miles of me there's more variance in language than in the English in the whole of North America. It's hard for Americans to understand how stubbornly communities can isolate themselves with language that "those people" don't know. Which is why the UK has so many more accents than the US. It's just time. Finnish tribes are still clearly visible mostly as counties, largely like in Italian. Although Finnish dialects I presume are closer together to each other than Italian ones, there's quite a bit of difference going from the extreme south to the extreme north. Or just driving a few hours east.

Tldr the longer point I'm making is that I get the center centre confusion, because English utilises the er-sound. But most languages don't, so... It's subjective. Finnish people probably say litra "liter-uh" sort of, because French and Swedes would've been saying sit so it ends in R, but ours don't, so we added an a. And the French wrote it litre, so we went with "litra", especially since "littera" was already taken.

Grammar ruled for French though, those I'm not gonna start explaining. Gonna run out of char limit.

I may be a bit straightforward, I mean to jestingly poke, not actually offend. My apologies if offense was caused.