This is quite a harmful misconception that keeps getting thrown around! English phonetics make sense; the phenomenon people notice is that in English, orthography recapitulates etymology, because English more than other languages acquires words from multiple sources (the broad categories are Germanic, Latin, and Greek). e.g. "orthography recapitulates etymology" contains Greek, Latin, and Greek derived words in order.
Maybe. I’m not well informed enough to say one way or the other, but it seems doubtful to me. Regardless, the end result is that it doesn’t. Nobody speaks English without loanwords, and someone has already demonstrated that doing that leads to such wonders as ‘uncleftish beholding’.
