You can always find the mot juste in English!

Talking of G B Shaw, he wanted to reform English spelling. (And some of those -ough endings are down to Caxton's printers making the pages look prettier!) GBS would have introduced more letters but reduced the length of many words by using s phonetic system. For example, the Greek phi would replace ph, theta would replace th. (Although there are already two letters used in Icelandic for 'th' in 'path and 'th' in 'the'.)

Steve