Comment by bombcar
1 day ago
I think the Aristotelian (though I might have reached for Platonic) idea is that there is an "A" which is essential, and that you map many various "A"s to that one A - which results in weirdness when you leave the Latin-alphabet based languages.
(Arguably even in English we run into the fact that there is not one "A" - there are many "A"s that sound and act completely different, and we collapsed them into one representation.)
Many times I have asked my Hungarian wife whether a sound is "a" or "a with an accent" (A vs Á), but they are different letters in Hungarian, not just variations of one as they are in Italian. We made a mess with "accent unification".
Which is always fun when you think that clearly nobody thinks of "o or o with a leg" (O vs Q).
That's not how Unicode works, A Α and А are different characters (latin, greek, cyrillic).
But for English speakers, there are many, many ways to interpret and pronounce that very Latin "A".
Many languages are strictly phonetic and their orthography has a very strict 1:1 ratio of glyph:sound. English is not one of those!
So in English, while we have five glyphs for the main vowels, those five glyphs have extremely versatile interpretations when actually converting into the spoken words.