The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

What I don't understand is why he doesn't write the sounds of the Chinese language using the Latin alphabet.

Could be for the same reason that everybody everywhere who had to record lectures, speeches, interviews, and court statements did not use the Latin alphabet, but You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  Namely, because Latin letters take too long to write.  

Or perhaps because the language had many sounds that did not exist in his own language, and would be cumbersome to encode with digraphs.   Like writing "tsh" for for the single consonant that is written "q" in pinyin, or "ue" for pinyin "ü".  Or tones: no one had yet thought of using diacritics for that, and anyway lifting the pen to write a diacritic on every three out of four syllables would have been too slow.

In fact, it is possible that he tried using Latin (or Arabic, or Hebrew, ...) letters at first, but halfway through the first page he realized that it would be way too slow, and concluded that he had to invent a shorthand for the purpose...

Why encrypt it as well?

It is not encrypted at all.  In fact, the whole point of writing it phonetically was to let himself and others read it without having to learn the ~500 Chinese characters that are used in that text.  Otherwise, he could just have bought a book. (Books were much cheaper than manuscripts in Europe, since they were printed on paper with one carved wood plate per page.  Matteo Ricci, writing to Rome in the late 1500, said that he was impressed by how quickly and precisely an artisan could carve one of those plates, after gluing onto it a sheet of paper with the handwritten text.)

All the best, --stolfi