Not so much that, as that the way you dealt with that amalgamation is different from the way Spanish did, and I’m using Spanish not just because I know it well but because its origins are as much of a hodgepodge as English: Latin, Phoenician, Greek, Germanic Languages, the Peninsula’s and Islands own original languages including that weirdo Basque, Arabic, Hebrew, Northern African dialects which got subsumed by Arabic, languages from India (generally via Portuguese) and from the New World (usually but not always directly)…
But you guys tried and keep trying to preserve both the original spelling (where “original” may be a transcription done by one of you or one from another Latin-script language) and pronunciation, so your spelling doesn’t follow internal rules: it instead tries to follow a wild mess of external rules, modified by dialectal variation. In Spanish, Portuguese, Italian… we would preserve whichever form we learned first (spoken or written) and adapt the other one, using our existing internal rules. You guys never came up with internal rules, really, no matter what proponents of phonics say: between dialectal variation, amount of phonemes, pronunciation changing because of guesses from people who either haven’t heard that word or don’t recognize it… any mapping you come up with has two hundred exceptions for any rule. But the difference does not come from English having many different sources: it comes from how you treat those sources.
