It's English that has the bastardized Latin!

Things like "ough" for /a:f/, and vowel shifts whereby /a/ gets written "u".

Compared to that, some languages have sane Latinization.

Since English is so pervasive, people round the world can look at it and feel good about their own Latinization.

> It's been always puzzling to me why borrowing Latin alphabet is usually considered today the only option. Many languages have phonetic alphabets of their own.

The Latin alphabet is the most popular phonetic alphabet, and keyboards (and formerly typewriters) for it are widely available. Not so for many of the others.

I can see that being a major motivation for Latinization, especially for smaller languages.

The argument that Chinese writing has to be made phonetic because Chinese is too hard only holds sway to non-Chinese. Most Chinese people do not consider Chinese writing to be too hard. Therefore the most common argument for phonetic writing is compatibility with international standards. As of now the Latin alphabet is the international standard.

> only holds sway to non-Chinese.

Well, I'd say it holds sway to learners that a) know a better system, and b) learn as adults. Both factors allow them to form a better judgment than kids that don't know any better.

Except all Chinese speakers in the current generation are taught Pinyin in school.

And many speakers write characters (on their computer or devices) using Pinyin, and forget how to write rare characters, see

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

* http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25291 (and the articles linked from it)

Yes and English speakers forget the spelling of rare words, especially if they were to spend extended periods of time using nothing but text-to-speech.

Those that do use Pinyin to write on their computers also know that the large number of homophones makes it an order of magnitude slower than using radical based input methods to directly type the characters such as Canjie, Wubi, Boshiamy etc.

Completely agree, see the mess that's been made in Kazakhstan: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-4312681...