one-nil wrote:The schwa leads to lazy pronunciation and confused vowel sounds. The English words "hybrid" and "militia" come quickest to mind.
Confused vowel sounds: "Mercedes". This takes three distinct sounds for the same "e"! Yow!
1) Schwa doesn't lead to anything. It is a vowel. (cf. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) Due to its properties of being centralized and unstressed, as the tongue moves naturally from extremes in the mouth, schwa is just a point in the process.
2) You are confusing the graphic representation of sound with the underlying linguistic nature. You have cited three foreign loanwords that arrived into English after being filtered diachronically through several other phonologies - while still retaining fairly original spellings.
But the Latin alphabet is not phonetic in nature. There is no one-to-one correspondence between every meaningful sound and a letter. Despite what people know about the alphabet from
Sesame Street and
Wheel of Fortune, there are roughly 24 phonemic consonants and anywhere from 15-25 vowels (depending on the dialect). Spellings would constantly be changing if the letter had to represent the exact sound used by every individual speaker. Not every 'e' whether spoken or written is the "same" because language works on allophonic manifestations of hyper-idealized phonemes. We do not all speak from the identically-shaped mouth. Variations naturally exist in all speakers - even within the same dialect. And that includes age- and sex-based formant frequencies from every speaker. Our minds process classes of sounds based on relativity. It is how tone languages still work amongst speakers of differing vocal pitch ranges.
3) Language and how it is depicted are not necessarily logical. Letters are arbitrary. And sounds are not absolute. George Bernard Shaw sought to impose a phonetic alphabet. It never caught on because it actually complicated mutual intelligibility across dialects. Sure it might be good for writing accents in a novel or describing English academically, but if he had written
Pygmalion entirely in his dialect of English using his alphabet, it would be locked in that variety of English and increasingly difficult to read by others, needing countless dialect printings.
4) This may be hard for you to accept but language is fluid. It changes. And nothing is more indicative of that than vowels. They shift most easily of all.
My pet peeve is when people with a limited understanding of linguistics complain pedantically about - or try to dictate how - language works.