The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[kckluge]

Are there any Asian languages (or any languages in general) that can't be captured in the Latin alphabet with a few modifications, like diacritics or use of punctuation symbols, to show elements like tone or non-European phonemes? I.E has a native Latin writer (for want of a better phrase) ever been forced to create a whole new alphabet in other circumstances?

I understand the point, but let's also look at it from the other side.

The creator(s) of the Voynich MS were most probably not forced to do anything.
This seems to be something they wanted to do, in the way that they chose to do it.

Back to the question, one could argue that Mandarin Chinese qualifies for this.
The existing systems (let's just concentrate on pinyin) are many-to-one mappings.

All of the following: [...] are transliterated as li4 or lì

I think you're misreading Rene's use of "forced" there. He's not using it in the sense of "someone put a gun (or crossbow :->) to their head", he's using it (I think) in the sense of "none of the Jesuits (say) who worked up Romanization schemes for tonal Asian languages found the Latin alphabet so inadequate for the purpose that they were motivated to invent a new script."

By the way, welcome back.