> Overstressed vowels: A lot of the time, people are lazy about pronouncing certain vowels—they’re un-emphasized and neutral, and just sort of hang loosely in the middle of the mouth, making an “euh” sound, regardless of which vowel it actually is.
Here's a funny notion. Perhaps in modern American English (at least the midwest accent), perhaps many of the vowels have actually become schwas and it's only the historic nature of the orthography that makes us think they should be something else. There's no vowel that sounds like the schwa naturally, but it's clearly a "missing" letter in the modern alphabet since it's also the most common vowel sound in American English. So every other vowel ends up being pronounceable as a schwa in various contexts.
Strangely, most people who use the schwa vowel regularly make a specific point to pronounce other key marker vowels correctly in order to distinguish the words, the rest of the vowels are unimportant to distinguish.
Imagine how much better English orthography would be if we could just use an 'ə' everyplace an unstressed vowel existed.
One problem with replacing all the schwas with ə in spelling is it would break the visual relationship between related words. (I don't know if this problem outweighs the benefits that would be gained from otherwise easier-to-learn spelling.)
For example "atom" and "atomic" would be spelled "atəm" and "ətomic". If you're learning the language and you know "atəm" and then see the word "ətomic", you might not know it's related to "atəm".
The situation would be even worse if we decided to spell consonants phonetically. In American English the t in "atom" sounds very different than the t in "atomic". Suppose we introduce a letter ɾ (from IPA) to spell the sound of t in "atom". Then it's even less evident that "aɾəm" and "ətomic" are basically two forms of the same word.
I think it's interesting to consider language as evolving based on the competition of at least four different stakeholders: Writers, Readers, Speakers, and Listeners.
Usually something that seems stupid for one role happens to make things easier for another, like your atom example.
English orthography is so loosely connected to phonetics that that's not going to help things very much; it'll solve one small problem in the mapping of orthography to phonetics (until the next pronunciation drift), break the linkage between orthography and semantic relations that (in English as it is) is closer than the orthography to phonetics link, but still leave orthography only very loosely related to phonetics.
English overloads vowels to the point that almost any vowel or any cluster of vowels can be pronounced like any other given certain contexts and there are far more vowel sounds than there are letters to represent. E.g. Despite being the most common vowel sound in the language, English has me symbol for schwa. Better representational symbology better aligns pronunciation with orthography and regularizes spelling.
Linguists do have a way of explicitly notating language, called IPA. However, just reading straight IPA can be exhausing. (dʒʌst ɹidɪŋ ai pi ɛi kæn bi ɛɡzɐstɪŋ). Not to mention, one's own accent comes through in the transcription. I remember in school i was confused by the utterance kœkəkœwlɐ which turned out to be "Coca-Cola" transcribed in a British accent (I'm from the US).
Here's a funny notion. Perhaps in modern American English (at least the midwest accent), perhaps many of the vowels have actually become schwas and it's only the historic nature of the orthography that makes us think they should be something else. There's no vowel that sounds like the schwa naturally, but it's clearly a "missing" letter in the modern alphabet since it's also the most common vowel sound in American English. So every other vowel ends up being pronounceable as a schwa in various contexts.
Strangely, most people who use the schwa vowel regularly make a specific point to pronounce other key marker vowels correctly in order to distinguish the words, the rest of the vowels are unimportant to distinguish.
Imagine how much better English orthography would be if we could just use an 'ə' everyplace an unstressed vowel existed.