For an alphabet to be phonetic, it doesn't really matter how complex the rules are for the alphabet, just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right?
> For an alphabet to be phonetic...just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right?
Yes, exactly.
If the English alphabet wasn't phonetic, it would be impossible to even try to "sound out" words. Everything would be pictograms or logograms (e.g. icons).
English has a phonetic alphabet, but history and cultural contact* have made the phonics complicated and inconsistent, but it doesn't mean they aren't there.
* Including the garbage practice of adopting foreign words with literally no spelling changes whatsoever, which in modern times has been taken to such ridiculous degrees as adopting Pinyin spellings in favor of other Chinese romanization systems that are more suited to English phonetics. Why write "ts" when you can write "c" and have every Englishspeaking person mispronounce it?
What phonetic meaning does the letter "h" carry when writing English? Especially with words like "honest" and "while". If adding a single letter at the end of a word changes the pronunciation of everything before it, it's not unlike adding a single stroke to a radical that changes the pronunciation of the whole kanji.
In other words, if you need to read the whole word in order to know how to pronounce it (and there are plenty of English examples in the aforelinked video), then, by definition, you're not doing anything remotely phonetic.
The phonetic value of [h] is /h/. In English spelling, many phonetic units are digraphs, not monographs (unsurprising when you consider that English has ~40 phonemes but only 26 letters in its alphabet).
The core phonetic rules of English are actually quite simple:
* Map consonant digraphs to phonemes where appropriate (e.g., [ch] goes to /tʃ/, [ph] goes to /f/).
* Map remaining consonants to a single phoneme, although note that [c] and [g] will map to /k/ or /s/ and /g/ or /dʒ/ respectively depending on the following letter.
* Map vowel digraphs to their monophthongs or diphthongs (e.g., [ai] goes to /ei/).
* Map vowel monographs to their "short" or "long" form depending on the following letters (e.g., [bet] is /bɛt/ while [bete] is /bit/, same as [beat]). Basic rule is vowel-consonant-vowel gets the "long" form, otherwise you get the "short" form. Doubling a consonant forces the "short" form without implying a doubled (geminate) consonant in pronunciation.
Those rules predict a large fraction of English pronunciation. You can get better by adding in rules on schwa reduction (unstressed vowels become /ə/) or rules to reflect the systematic sound changes of the past few centuries (e.g., how [-tion] becomes /ʃun/). There are still irregularities beyond that ("English" isn't justifiable by any spelling rules), and then you have the frustrating tendency of English to insist on using foreign spellings and foreign pronunciations of foreign words (e.g., "coup" is French and should be pronounced as in French and "onomatopoeia" is Greek and should be pronounced as in Greek).
Still complex compared to Polish, which has a ratio of letters-to-phonemes much closer to 1 (five digraphs in total). While it's a hard language to learn overall, its orthography is one of the parts that are pretty simple compared to English. Only three homophone pairs are present throughout the language (H/CH, Ż/RZ, Ó/U); voicing and devoicing is a thing (PRZ... almost always sounds like PSZ...); Ą and Ę have a rule where they are fully nasalized depending on context; palatalization is everywhere, and it's probably the most complex part. Foreign words are very often polonized ("onomatopeja" from your example).
Maybe I'm biased as a Polish native but I do not think the above is comparable to the mess of exceptions that is English.
A phonetic script is one where the symbols represent sounds. The Latin alphabet is a phonetic script. In contrast, consider the shared numeric system used in both English and Polish. How do you pronounce "1"? What about "10" or "11" - does using the same symbol in all three numbers give you any hint about whether they sound the same? What if I'm saying the numbers in French?
The answer is of course, no, those symbols don't have an associated sound. They have an associated meaning and there are many spoken words for that meaning.
If that is the case, how would you describe the act of comparing English to languages which actually have consistent letter-phoneme pronunciation throughout the language (starting with e.g. the same number of available letters and phonemes and a 1:1 mapping between them)?
Funnily enough, Egyptian hieroglyphs were in fact phonetic: they just used recognizable pictures instead of abstract symbols to represent the sounds. It's possible they were sometimes used as ideograms too, but not the standard.
Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the written character gives you no indication of what the sound of the spoken word is.
