The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Mauro]

Not to mention it is naturally quicker and easier to write in a system you have learnt and used and practised your entire life.

That is a good argument ... against all the other theories.  

Why did the Author invent a new script, instead of using Latin letters?  

If the text was a known language in a simple substitution cipher, one could say that he invented a new alphabet to make the encryption safer.  But it is not a simple substitution cipher; if it is cipher, it is one that put the NSA to shame.  Then using Latin letters instead of that original script would have not made it any easier to crack.

......

In fact, the Chinese Origin Theory seems to be the only one that can offer a plausible explanation for why the book uses an original script, and why the script looks that way.  Namely, for the same reason that people have invented new alphabets: to make it easier to write down a language whose sounds would not easily map to the alphabet they used themselves... 

All the best, --stolfi

I will notice the Lewis & Clark example you presented is a case where what you say above did not happen: they did not invent any new script, they used the English alphabet, and even English phonetics, to approximate the sounds of Amerindian languages (which are very different from English ones).

For what my limited knowledge of the argument can say, original scripts are quite rare and those existing have not been created by foreigners, but by motherlanguage speakers who understood their own language very well (ie. Han-gul, Cherokee scripts). In all other cases I know where someone tried to transcribe a foreign language they used their own writing system to approximate the foreign phonemes, starting from ancient Egyptians at least.