A thought

[oshfdk]

In languages like Latin, English, German, etc., we have the alphabet (ABCD...), such that it creates letters, whereas in languages like Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc., there is one character or more (你, 我, 对。。。) for one word.

It looks like there are just not enough different glyphs in the manuscript for it to be a system like the Chinese characters. However, if the question is more about whether the system is phonetic (primarily designed to represent sounds) or not, I think no-one knows.