When I was a child I used to think that it would make so much more sense to spell everything phonetically using the symbols that one will find in all dictionaries. I also thought that it was rather absurd that the abbreviation for pounds is lbs. and not something more simple such as pds. And why on earth was penny abbreviated as d. Later on, having understood both the historical artifacts enclosed in our spelling, abbreviations and just the pure depth of languages and not solely English I changed my view entirely. One might think that to spell through, brought, night and Knight just to name a few is rather absurd but then once again one would lose an understanding of the historic Anglo-Saxon roots of such words. Jeez, I didn't thoughly understand English grammar until I learned German.
One may look at the French language which has similar vowels, diphthongs, dropped endings and unaspirated vowels making up the same sounds as hardly logical at all, but when its history and structure is thoroughly understood the logic of its spelling is readily apparent.
One might look at the Japanese language and how it's written and come to a conclusion of how absurd it is; given it's the most difficult language in the world to write. A language which uses two different syllabaries and Chinese ideograms how ridiculous can such a language be.? But if one studies the language in depth it also reveals not only its history but its but the utility in how it's written. Chinese ideograms: difficult to learn but representative of a single concept rather than a phonetic one. Writing them also requires less effort than single phonetic representations of a word. Also specifically in Japanese each ideogram, almost always has two different pronunciations; one representing the native Japanese pronunciation and the other representing the Chinese. This may seem also absurd, but if one sees how they are employed it makes a lot of sense. I won't go into any details but it allows them to form a plethora of compound words similar to how we do in English, but in our case we use Greek and Latin.
When I looked thru some of the content in the original thread it seemed I was struck by one thing which I found absurd in his original posting and that's the argument that language isn't a "social construct". That may be true if understood from a rigid deconstructionist perspective, but language without question is a cultural ,technological as well as historical construct.