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).