Here’s another thing I discovered in Taiwan. I didn’t know such a script existed!
Photos from a zoo:
Photos from a library:
It’s called bopomofo and you can only find it in children’s books and on signs written for small children. Taiwanese children use it as a stepping stone to Chinese characters, and adults still use it as the input method on mobile phones! In Mainland China bopomofo has been replaced by pinyin for both these uses.
Bopomofo is similar to kana in that the shapes originate from simplification of Chinese characters. The shapes even remind me of katakana. On the other hand, it’s similar to hangul in that each bopomofo character generally represents one phoneme, rather than an entire mora or syllable. And similarly to hangul, each syllable is written as a top-to-bottom block. Uniquely, it has tone marks.
Bopomofo has about the same number of symbols as a Japanese kana (37 + 5 tone marks), but that’s because Chinese is much richer in phonemes than Japanese. If Japanese used an alphabet like bopomofo or hangul, about 15 characters would suffice. On the other hand, a syllabary for Chinese would require over 1200 symbols.