An experiment with phonetic writing

[ololololo]

I find the other possibility, that they were just taking down sounds, and badly, hard to credit.

Imagine that you are an Englishman who has come to France. You need to learn the language, and first and foremost, you need to learn to speak it, but not to write it. You have at least roughly learned the necessary words at a conversational level.
Now you will need to write down a book in French... You can’t read, so you hire someone to dictate it to you. Overall, you’re just recording sounds. And it’s very bad, because you don’t know how to record them correctly. 
The result will likely be a hard‑to‑read tirade, because, being untrained in written French, you will write the word aujourd’hui as ujuvi (or something similar).