> spelling words in such pointless ways

Define "pointless". Each word has its own etymology, and if we're going to be honest here, the different spellings aren't _that_ complicated. Take it up with English's ancestors for borrowing words from many different languages, and then with more recent ancestors for the great vowel shift, among other things leading to change.

Language is never going to make sense. It's not prescriptive- we just make changes, arbitrarily, sometimes due to mistakes, and it either catches on or it doesn't. Trying to "fix" language is an impossible task because no one is making the rules. English in particular doesn't have a language council making decisions, unlike say, Korean. It doesn't matter anyways because "Standard English" is quite different than day to day conversation, and even in formal settings it's based on stylistic guidelines, not hard rules.

Just let it be- devising an _arbitrary_ method of attempting to corral an entire language is an impossible task. And any work would be undone within one generation anyways since languages evolve. Esperanto, a manufactured language, has already seen linguistic changes by its native speakers (kids who were taught it growing up).

Indefinitely.

If you want a history of attempts to fix it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

Spelling comes from the root of each individual word. It makes sense to keep them written this way. Not everything makes phonetic sense especially in English where imported words are countless.

what do you suggest instead: naif, nife, nyve ..?

nife is fine

Why is there an "e" at the end?

I'm reminded of how English orthography has that weird thing where the presence of a silent E can seemingly change the vowel in the previous syllable. For example the Tom Lehrer song, "who can turn a can into a cane? Silent E..."

So a hypothetical "nife" would never be mistaken for "neef", as "nif" could be.

Or mistaken for niff. [0]

(No, I didn't know this word existed before this moment.)

[0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/niff

Move to a phonetic alphabet. E.g. Arabic.

We could also just add accents, diacrits to exhaustion to englissh letters. Without that in arabic you couldn't even tell /a/, /e/, /i/ apart, they are all aleph in word initial position. Our orthographie is phine, your pronnuntzashun is just lazy

You can write phonetically on the Latin alphabet perfectly fine, for example Finnish does so. In the case of English, its a matter of standardizing the pronunciation of characters (considering it requires every English speaker to essentially learn to write/read again, just changing the alphabet to Arabic is almost easier).