I don't know who invented this stupidity in Russian, English and many other languages!
"e" it should sound like "э", not like "ye" or like "i". Meaningless linguistic transformations!
On some level, I agree.

The thing is, vowel reduction takes form in the vast majority of languages, and in different ways. English has it too, for sure, we just have no idea at all what the 'rules' are. "Rules" in this case, are just the manifestation of pattern. We have little to no pattern, so we, English Speakers, have no idea that we reduce vowels. Russians have the ability to educate their speakers properly on the patterns, though Im not sure how much they really do. I've heard a Russian emigrant to Spain talk about how she doesn't understand the word "собака". It was because she wasn't taught about vowel reduction so she thought it was just random and poorly thought out. This is another case where learners of a language can end up understanding a language more than natives [who vs. whom].

Germanic languages have Umlaut, which they have adjusted to and now spell umlauted u: ü. English went through a similar thing but.... Not so purely.
German on TOP of that, reduces non stressed 'e' to the Schwa sound.
The schwa sound is incredibly common as a reduced sound and most unstressed vowels seem to just tend towards it. Probably not a coincidence that it is located in the center of the IPA vowel chart.


If so many language reduce in this way, the assumption is:


It's inevitable, natural, and simply something we must plan for and work with.

I guess... The next step is to pull some old, obscure cyrillic symbols out of the history books, and use them to represent reduced ɪ and the other sounds...

Maybe we'll get into a 'ѣ' situation there though....

Also, there is a tradeoff with making spelling fully represent sound changes, which is that they represent etymological changes less as a result....