| Well, again, what problem are you trying to solve? It sounds like your reform is specifically targeted at people who already know English and are therefore aware that "lives" has only two candidate pronunciations, neither of which is more than one syllable long. But people like that don't need help. The reason there are only two pronunciations of "lives" is that one is the regular plural of the noun "life" and one is the regular pres-3sg form of the irregularly-spelled verb "live". Anyone who's aware of the two words should have absolutely no trouble determining whether a word in an English sentence is a noun or a verb! But your scheme will do nothing for people who aren't already very familiar with English, because it does nothing to indicate the pronunciation of the word being spelled. It limits itself to reminding the reader which of two options was desired. The spelling isn't what was restricting you to two options. (Also, you added an accent to the word "she", where there was only one option to begin with.) Note also that an accent is already used in formal written English to disambiguate between written vowels that might or might not be pronounced at all: thus you have learned and blessed (one syllable, verbs or participles) and learnd and blessd (two, adjectives). > So “put” is still put. There’s nothing that could be disambiguated with an accent for this word. Of course there is. "Put" does not use any of the ten vowels traditionally described as "short" or "long". It still has a vowel in it. It still theoretically needs to be disambiguated from the vowels of "hut" and (according to you, though English spelling rules don't really allow for ambiguity here) "hoot". Accents can do whatever you want. |