The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

to make it easier to write down a language whose sounds would not easily map to the alphabet they used themselves...

Is it that difficult?
It is much easier to compare the phonetics of Chinese with regular Latin than with any other alphabet.
It can be assumed that the author was a perfectionist and strove to convey the phonetics of Chinese as accurately as possible, ignoring the similarities with Latin. But... this is again an assumption. In fact, this is the whole Chinese theory.

Not easier at all...  Even Mandarin, which seems to be a "Chinese" with relatively simple phonetics, any mapping of the  consonants to Latin letters would have been (and still is) awkward, requiring two or more letters per phoneme and rather unnatural assignments (like pinyin "q" for one of the "ts"-like consonants). Check  the last 10 entries of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (play the sounds).

The vowels of Mandarin seem to be rather simple (only 5-6 of them), but then there are the tones.  Pinyin uses diacritics to encode them, but, depending on the Author's origin, they may have been unnatural to him.  And even a single dot counts as a separate pen stroke.   Each of the 4 tones is not a pitch but a pitch pattern.  In particular, pinyin uses a single diacritic to encode the falling-then-rising tone (three different pitch levels in the same syllable).  Would the Author have though of that?  He may instead have thought of encoding the pitch levels, which would use up at least 3 of the 26 letters.   Moreover, the tone applies to the whole syllable, not to any specific letter.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an alternative system for encoding the Mandarin tones using only Latin letters with no diacritics.  Check how complicated that is.  (Taiwan still clings to it, like they cling to the "Traditional" characters; apparently mostly for political reasons.) 

And things may be even worse for other languages, Chinese or otherwise.  Cantonese has six tones, and what seems to be the most common phonetic spelling uses digit suffixes 1-6 rather than diacritics.  Vietnamese now has 6 tones too, but in the 1400s it may have had 8, and some of them are distinguished by a glottal stop rather than pitch.  It also has 12 vowels.  The modern script uses diacritcs both to distinguish vowels and to indicate tones, so often there are two diacritics on the same letter.

All the best, --stolfi