>>But you may wish to add "plaid" to your list of odd English words.
>>It's pronunciation is questionable considering "paid", "laid", "plain" and such.
>
>English is borderline shizophrenic, considering the divorce between sound, its alphabetic representation, and logic.
>
>http://www.ndragan.com/langsr/istoisto.html is then maybe something for your weekend amusement - a beginning of a list of groups of sounds that sound the same to me (and my English teachers, and the ISO phonetic notation in most of the cases) but actually are just homofones. The Serbian text to the right is just translation.
>
>BTW - plaid and plead (in past tense) ARE pronounced the same, right?

No. "plaid" is 'plad' (like glad) while plead is 'pled' (like led).