>>22883313Japanese at least has an escape hatch (phonetic alphabets). Chinese never had one and they instead had to import roman letters and invent pinyin.
Historically, they did have a method of correlating pronunciation of letters starting from a small "bootstrap set" of letters (see 反切 fanqie). But this wasn't really used and most mainland Chinese unironically believe that pinyin was the first phonetic system.
>>22883317Here's a Korean newspaper from 60 years ago.
