Zhuyin Fuhao 注音符號 is a phonetic alphabet for Chinese, the only one I know of (in addition to Musa) that doesn't use the Roman alphabet. It was invented in 1913 by Zhang Binglin 章炳麟, based on shorthand versions of Chinese characters. It was the first of several phonetic alphabets developed over the following few decades, and is the one that most faithfully corresponds to Chinese phonology. In addition, it's very parsimonious: it usually requires fewer symbols than any other phonetic alphabet, including Musa. So why did it fail? Bad timing: it was released only two years before the pendulum swung back to keeping Chinese characters as symbols of nationalist pride in 1930, and perhaps was seen as designed to replace them. Too bad - that was China's last chance to solve this problem on their own.

Despite my admiration for Bopomofo, I think it has several flaws that should be corrected if it's ever to be considered again for use as a primary orthography:

1. Originally, Bopomofo didn't write the tones (neither did Latinxua Sin Wenz). Incredibly, the linguists of the period didn't think tones were important! The first romanization that tried to write tones was Gwoyeu Romatzyh, but it turned out to be too difficult to use. The problem was only solved when the Yale romanization introduced the use of diacritics to write tones; that idea and the diacritics themselves were then adopted by the subsequent romanizations Hanyu Pinyin, MPS II, and Tongyong Pinyin.

   Bopomofo is now written using Yale tone marks, but not as diacritics: they're written as suffixes after the end of the syllable. The position is fine, and in fact as the final symbol they serve to separate syllables so that spaces aren't needed for that. The problem is that they're too small to be easily read and distinguished when Bopomofo is used as Ruby text (subtitles) - they're diacritics! It would be trivial for China to introduce five more full-sized Bopomofo symbols to spell out the tones.

2. Bopomofo has a symbol for first tone, but it's not used: first tone is spelled by using no tone mark. Why? To save a symbol? So it's not confused with the Y medial? Bad idea: just spell out the tone.

   Likewise, Bopomofo has a symbol ㄭ for the apical vowel after retroflex and palatal initials, but it's usually not written. Let's just write it; it's better to write a symbol than to make users remember a rule.

3. When people think of alphabets, they think of symbols being written in a line, in a sequence. But Hangeul - the world's best writing system (after Musa) - is an alphabet, and the symbols are arranged into squares that look like Chinese characters. The advantage is that it's very clearly when one syllable ends and the next begins, so that words like jinyan or xian aren't ambiguous.

   Bopomofo could also be written in blocks. Since the bopomofo letters are square, a block has room for four of them in a 2×2 grid: initial and medial in the top row, and final and tone in the bottom row. Missing symbols would simply be omitted, since the Bopomofo symbols aren't meant to be stretched.

4. Maybe it's just me, but I find the Bopomofo symbols hard to remember and hard to distinguish, like Japanese kana. The Chinese characters from which these alphabets were derived just don't have much variety of strokes - for instance, they have no curves (although two Bopomofo symbols have curves). In addition, a featural phonetic alphabet like Musa is much easier to learn and remember. For me, it's a missed opportunity.

   I also often find the Bopomofo letters too widely spaced. They're already sparse - more space than ink - and wide spacing makes them hang together less. When they're used as ruby text, it also makes them too small.

5. Bopomofo has been extended to enable transcription of other Chinese languages, notably Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Cantonese. Hokkien needs 23 more letters than the 38 needed by Standard Chinese, and unfortunately most of them were created by adding small loops to standard letters, for voicing of consonants or nasalization of finals, in addition to letters for final consonants and extra tones. Cantonese adds a few more, but even worse, it uses a middle dot to indicate final consonants.

   With 60+ letters, we begin to approach the practical limits for keyboards, both mechanical and virtual. Imagine a 70-key keyboard on your phone: 7 rows of 10? Musa only needs 26 keys, and that includes punctuation.

6. One advantage of Bopomofo over Musa is that finals are written with only one symbol, while they need two symbols in Musa: vowel and final consonant. Bopomofo needs 15 symbols to write the standard Chinese finals, including medials, while Musa needs 17. But Musa letters always stand for the same sound, while Bopomofo letters don't: the vowels in -eng -ong -ing -iong sound quite different, and they're written with different letters in Musa, but they're all written with the same final in Bopomofo.

7. Japan, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma all have unique writing systems for their national languages. And why shouldn't they? A national script for a national language. But several problems arise. First and most obvious, foreigners can't read it. So you doom yourself to printing romanizations all over (and the romanizations are usual bad and inconsistent). You also doom your citizens to learning the Roman alphabet, if only to be able to travel abroad if not for use at home.

   Second, your national script may not be well-supported by fonts, keyboards, and apps. It took so long for Arabic - with the additional problems of right-to-left script, connected and unconnected letters, and missing vowels - to be supported by digital technology that Arabic speakers developed a Roman-alphabet transcription called Arabish or Arabizi for use with cell phones. The Indian language Odia, with 34 million L1 speakers in Odisha and surrounding states, is in Unicode but very poorly supported by fonts and apps, since it uses its own abugida.

   Yes, your national pride might incent you to use your own calendar, your own number system, your own measuring units, and your own wall voltage, in addition to your own currency and your own language and script, but the result is not to strengthen your independence but to weaken it, since you force everyone to learn the international versions as well. That's the idea behind Musa: by using a single alphabet, we make it possible for everyone to write their own language, even their own dialect, without being punished for it. It may be the key to survival by endangered and even minority languages.

Musa for Chinese >