u/Daniboy0826

Most other spelling systems that I see on other European languages are very phonetic, English, French and Irish are the only ones that I notice that, above all, chose to preserve historical pronunciations instead of current ones, I might be wrong, though.

By the way, I'm specifying European ones because I know that outside of Europe, some languages like Vietnamese and Tibetan have varying degrees of etymology preservation too.

When I found out that the most agreed upon vowel inventory for Russian was simply /a e i o u/, I was kinda shocked considering how many letters in the alphabet there were for vowels, but as I looked deep further, most of them were just for palatalization: Ю /ʲu/, Я /ʲa/...

Except for Ы which had its own [ɨ] sound dedicated to it? But apparently it is just an allophone for /i/? Doesn't it contrast with /i/ on words such as "и́кать" and "ы́кать"?

The Moscow school says that [ɨ] is not a phoneme, but the Saint-Petersburg phonology school says otherwise.