SHORT ANSWERS:
You say in a comment:
no one offers an answer as why not to use the "â" letter alone,
instead of "î"
If that is your main question, the answer is the following: the intention of the 1993 reform that generalized â without eliminating î was based on an etymological logic, not on the one of phonetic consistency and uniformity, which is behind your suggestion. If consistency were the goal, no 1993 reform would have existed. But Romanian kept some level of etymological reasoning because of the ROMÂN/ROMÂNIA family. Now, after 1993, that reasoning became more influential, but some things are far too obvious, namely that words starting with ÎN (like început) are descending from Latin forms with i (incipit), while the preposition ÎN itself is reflecting the Latin IN. Without explicitly arguing it, it is because of omnipresence of words starting with Latin IN that the rule was introduced that Î will stay Î at the beginning of words. I see no other reason, although it makes no sense for words like înger, when ânger would have been closer to Latin angelus. Why these inconsistencies: because the 1993 reform is an inconsistent etymological reform.
If your question is that in the title, the answer is YES.
LONGER ANSWERS:
It is a matter of standardization and consistency. Consistency seems to be your concern here. But that goes against your argument or impression: Î letter is based on (is a variation of) I, Â-letter is based on A. The close central unrounded vowel is noted phonetically ɨ for the simple reason that it is closer to I than to A.
See vowel chart image here.
Is /ɨ/ more close /i/ than it is to /ə/? YES! But it is even closer to /i/ than to /a/, which would be what you should ask in order to have the change you want!
And it is not just ”some people” that think the 1993 change was wrong: most linguists do, and the decision was made by non-specialists dominating the Romanian Academy. See here the principal arguments.
Even within your own terms, I don't see why you talk about closeness of îÎ to ăĂ as an argument for Ââ against Îî, when the significant aspect here is whether îÎ/âÎ (the ɨ sound) is closer to /a/ than to /i/.
The presence (re-introduction) of â in Romanian is based on etymological reasons, a type of reasons that as you suggested are not determinant in Romanian writing overall, but were used here exceptionally, or rather in an odd way: instead of the exceptional status of the words relating to Romania/Romanian before 1993, where only these words had â to reflect Roman etymology (and I don't see what's imperialistic about that! - unlike what some comments say here - it is an exceptional case, that of the words that are not just of Latin origin but self-referentially indicate that origin!), that exception became the rule, because supposedly more Romanian words of Latin origin containing the ɨ sound have that sound evolving from A than from other vowels, namely I.
What you ask is why not simplify further in the direction initiated in 1993. That is a fair question, but the argument cannot be that ɨ and ə are close: the reference is given by the limits /a/ and /i/, because they are written in Romanian as A and I, which give the model for Ă, Â and Î. There are huge obstacles against what you suggest, even etymological ones, one of them being that the typically Romance-looking and expected prefix of Latin origin IN- which in Romanian gave ÎN- should be written ÂN-! (In fact I think the frequency of that form would easily push up the number of most frequently used words with I-based Latin etymology.)
There are problems with the 1993 reform, but what you propose is not a way out of them.
In my opinion the most severe problem with the 1993 reform was that SÎNT was replaced with SUNT in pronunciation, something unheard of before! That was not even done explicitelly, but by simply forgetting to mention that SUNT is to be just an orthografic change - like the 1934 reform explicitelly mentioned: see here, page 16, ”formele cu Î ale verbului a fi se scriu cu U”: the Î-forms of the verb TO BE will be written with U. (”The Î-forms” simply means ”the phonetic-Δ!) Thus, after 1934 SUNT was read /sɨnt/, but after 1993 the /sunt/ pronunciation became standard and /sɨnt/ became irregular! - The merit of the consistency you suggest is that it would have avoided the removal of /sɨnt/ , which would have remained at least as SÂNT. Why was just SUNT accepted? Because that was the orthography between 1934 and 1956 (not before and not in all papers though!). That after 1934 SUNT was to be read /sɨnt/, the amateurish reform of 1993 simply forgot!
(It is the communist authorities who pretended, falsely, that - like any good thing they did, from electrification to vaccination - the 1956 reform was ”communist” in nature and anti-bourgeois, when in fact it was restoring things from before 1934 and simply deciding in favor of a consistent development that had started in the 19th century. People saying that 1993 reform was anti-communist are thus repeating communist propaganda!)
EDIT IN RESPONSE TO OP COMMENTS:
In replay to the OP comments :
(Overall reply: please read https://bjiasi.ro/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/REFORME-ORTOGRAFICE.pdf)
"Masînă" is very speicfic Moldavian regional pronunciation with slavic
influences.
„Mașînă” was how my old grandmother from Teleorman said it and there's nothing Slavic about it. She also said EU ZÎC for EU ZIC, and such regional ways of speaking all over Romania have nothing to do with Slavic influences. You should read more about the history of the language, Rosetti, Chitorac, Margaret E. L. Renwick and such before formulating your categorical statements. There basically is no Πsound in Serbian and Bulgarian, but is the way Bulgarian ĂOE was in many cases reduced into Romanian: î is a fundamental and typical Romanian sound, although it might have evolved from ăĂ during an unattested moment.
In the book Phonetics and Phonology of Contrast, The Case of Romanian Vowel System by Margaret E. L. Renwick we can read how the Romanian /ɨ/ sound was created within Romanian as part of a specific mechanism of transformation which later was applied to Slavic words. The impact of Slavic and later Turkish has accelerated the process of development and separation of /ɨ/ from ăĂ (that is: /ʌ/) because /ɨ/ was used to assimilate such borrowing into Romanian: which proves that there is a Romanian mechanism at play with the development of /ɨ/, not a simple Slavic borrowing as many naively think. - If you think Moldavian speech is somehow spechifically Slavic-influenced you are very wrong: Slavic influences on Romanian are of southern origin and are equally distributed (for the very reason that the present area of the language was occupied after the main Slavic impact by people comming all from the same place, namely Transylvania).
I personally think sînt and pîine and cîine are ugly! I just can't stand >them.
I am instead tired of this kind of childish arguments. Please read the book from the Iași linguistic institute that I have linked above, and then see if the light of reason (specialists, wise people with real experience in linguistics, which is a real science, not a whim! for God’s sake) is not preferable to impressionism. You can also see my reddit posts in which I have tried to explain why this hate against ÂÎ (I mean not just the Î letter, but the sound!) is a naive, snobish and even neurotic trend.
Reading Margaret E. L. Renwick’s book I have realized though that it might be another reason here: the mechanism that was at play within Romanian language which has produced the ÎÂ sound has stopped working at some point, while the language has entered the modern era. It might be that this transition has created some type of allergy to it in some Romanian speakers, also because of the sudden exposure to the rest of Romance, where we feel the need to be accepted and recognized. It might take some time for our inferiority complexes to cool down and to realize that REALLY Romanian is SO Latin that nobody cares about our self-doubts and our ruminations whether ÎÂ is worthy of a descendant of the blood-thursty Romans! We should in fact be so self-confident as to be able to write ”Romînia” and still feel Latin as hell! (Just like we should consider the possibility that Romanians might be Balkan-Latins and not Dacians, without fearing the loss of Transylvania etc.)
Still, I think our national neurosis is at play here and won’t heal easily.
because I tend to actually pronounce [sunt] and not [sînt];
No hate. But I am polemic about it because I love my language, I am invested in it deeply, I have a literary and philosophical education and think I know what such phenomena say about language and thought, both individually and collectively. I am basically furious that I cannot change people’s minds. But I guess I can be wise enough to accept fatality. Eminescu himself was able to write SUNT, although he said SÎNT (see my reddit link). I accept the â-generalization as a fait accompli, I can accept SUNT, but not as an exclusive form and certainly not obligatory in speech! but I refuse the idea that SÎNT is not a correct word and that children should be taught that idea. I know that writing can impact spelling (there is a book about that) but I hate how this was done and what it says about those who pushed it: ignorance, authoritarianism, docility, short-sightedness!
it's a common misconception that the reform only changed the wiring and >not also the pronunciation
Stop being patronizing. I was mature when that happened, it took decades for people to realize there is more than a orthographic reform involved. Linguists debating the issue even concentrated only on the â-î problem because they didn’t even imagined that a Sînt-SUNT change will affect the way people should speak (read the famous article by Alf Lombard article on dexonline! https://dexonline.ro/article/Alf_Lombard_-_Despre_folosirea_literelor_î_și_â). I have all the documents of the reform (there are also in the Iași book) and I have commented on the matter on reddit link if you ever care to get into that. Note that the 1993 reform basically wants to go back to before 1956, that is, to 1934 (or is it 1931?) reform. But there the SUNT is presented EXPLICITLY as an EXCLUSIVE orthographic change. That people started to say it SUNT under the impact of writing it’s another matter.
E, Ionescu.
I have videos with Iorga, G. Călinescu and others saying SÎNT. That is not the issue anyway. The problem is that SÎNT cannot be forbidden in schools, as it is now (I fear).
doom.lingv.ro
That the passage you indicate was necessary is very significant and totally ridiculous! It is a proof of the initial confusion and of the fact that those that did the reform didn't know what they were doing. The fact that no lingust voted in favor is no misconception! Those ex-militaries and elecronic engeneers that decided on the language got mixed up in a series of consequences they did not unticipated initially, so that only step-by-step started regulating on what happens with îâ at the end, after prefixes etc. Luckily they had the 1934 reform that they could use as a guide, but too bad they omitted the part about SUNT! They didn't feel the need to present a serious and ballanced argumentation, just boasted about historical significance, communist persecution and ”Russification” using pompous nationalistic slogans, as if Romanian communism hadn't been nationalistic at all and they were the late-coming restorers of national language. They blatantly stated they repaired some injury done by the communists - thus simply repeating what the communists themselves pretended they did: there is no surprise there though: the people of the 1991-93 reform were all former communist dignitaries...
https://doom.lingv.ro/studiu_introductiv/reguli_scriere_pronuntare 2.2.2 sânt, sînt sau sunt?
Of course reasonable people got confused. They got confused that some other people could imagine they can overnight change the most important form of the most important verb of a language. I bet that has never happened before in the history of the world!
