An experiment with phonetic writing

[rikforto]

I think you are trying to draw a few distinctions generally that do not apply specifically to the example at present.

You can speak French without knowing how to write it. Don’t try to dispute this; there are still completely unwritten languages in the world, and people somehow manage to communicate in them.

I understand this is a common state of affairs but as I understand the VMS, it is in fact written down. We must surely then be talking about a written form of the language. What exactly are we trying to model otherwise?

Likewise, I appreciate that this might be a naive attempt at transcribing the language, but a French speaker (even a second language learner) is not attempting to transcribe a language he does not know. To know spoken French is to know its phonology well enough to be able to parse these distinctions on the fly. He is also not trying to adapt the Latin alphabet if the VMS is what we are trying to model, but can capture the phonemic distinctions---that he can largely understand, by hypothesis---in a natural way.

For Chinese languages, the tones may be difficult to hear (though y'all are making this sound wayyy harder to learn than it really is) if you can't speak the language, but a person who cannot reliably identify the tones is a person who cannot speak the language and cannot be described as a person who has learned the local language.

Maybe I do not understand what we are attempting to model here, but it seems very different from a speaker of the language inventing a script to take dictation!