Quote from: Prelate Diogenes Shandor on December 22, 2014, 10:09:49 PM
They don't even have an alphabet!
It wouldn't have to be the latin alphabet; it could just as easily be cyrillic, or greek, or kana or a totally new system, but not having an alphabet at all is backward and makes the language needlessly obtuse.
Mandarin Chinese has a syllabary called zhuyin or bopomofo. It was derived from ancient chinese character forms in 1910 and is used similar to japanese furigana in taiwan to help children with pronunciation.
So, yes, they do have an endemic syllabic system for writing sounds down.
If you want a backwards writing system, look to old norse -- they wrote that shit with an alphabet that didn't even contain enough graphemes to express all of the phonemes in the language.
Hell, modern danish doesn't have a character to mark the stød, and god help non-natives reading swedish or norwegian with tonal accents. And don't even get me started with how poorly the early icelanders seemed to understand the whole concept behind latin consonants... I mean, do you think the romans put a rollicking tounge-slap somewhere in the middle of 'puella'?
Zhuyin at least covers all of mandarin's phonemes and tonal qualities and without weird shit that doesn't make sense...