Why are so many English words not spelled as they sound?

I've posted this before, but just to reinforce your point:

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead –
For goodness’ sake don’t call it “deed”!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s does and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and go and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart –
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive,
I’d mastered it when I was five

Many English words have a foreign origin. French. German. Celtic. Olde English. So modern English is often a mixed up spelling version of the originals.

That's why in essense the Americans don't speak English but American. This is because they change words and phrases away from the true English into something different.

Firstly, because pronunciation changes. Spelling effectively froze shortly after printing was invented, but pronunciation, being in people's mouths, changes continuously. For example, the word "knife", taken from the French "canif", originally had a sounded "k". People's use of language changed, but the sspelling different. In Chaucer's day, the "l" in "would" was clearly pronounced - he spelt it "wold".

Furthermore, English is a prime raider of words from other languages. If they are raided from languages using the Latin alphabet, they tend to get copied over even when those other languages used the alphabet differently. If they come from non-Latin scripts, they are transliterated differently according to the accents of bot the foreigner and the person doing the transliteration.

because our words are taken from latin.