https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh/%E6%B3%A8%E9%9F%B3%E7%AC%A6%E8...

But it wasn’t created by/for Taiwanese specifically, by that time Taiwan was under Japan’s rule and they were learning Japanese at the schools. Indeed it was imported back into Taiwan when KMT fled there.

PRC then went on its own jounery of inventing its own Romanization scheme for Chinese. They once almost chose Cyrillic alphabet because its ideological alliance with Soviets, but Latin script still won at the end of day, because the scholars were convicned it is more widely used and more useful.

[0]:http://img1.gtimg.com/news/pics/hv1/74/203/2056/133743239.pn...

Many cultures that borrowed Chinese characters developed their own ways of simplifying them. Moreover, Chinese characters themselves are composed of distinct radicals, so it's rather natural to try to decompose them when needed. The radicals are ancient, but they can look very similar to kana in their simple forms. This could be an example of parallel evolution, not one borrowing exclusively from another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_script

It's a system introduced by the Republic of China, and tha continues to be used in the Republic of China (only Taiwan left these days).

That's because the mainland switched to Pinyin in the 50s.

That being said, Taiwan has now also officially switched to Pinyin so use may increase.

Edit:

Another interesting, and old, system to write Mandarin using the Arabic alphabet: Xiao'erjing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing

Edit 2:

Bopomofo is in the same line as Hiragana/Katakana/Korean system: It simplifies and make things phonetic but still creates a brand new characters set inspired by Chinese characters.

With Pinyin, to me the main development was to integrate that there was already an ubiquitous alphabet in existence, the latin alphabet, that could be used and save the trouble of yet another writing system.

A bit like what happened in Vietnam (though obviously that's because a Frenchman came up with the system).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4578

You see bopomofu is to denote pronunciation not to romanticize characters. If you are talking about how location/street names are spelled, some form of pinyin (literally means spelling) had always been used for romanticization.

Hopefully they don't switch to pinyin, and I especially hope they don't switch to Simplified.

Wikipedia says it was created under the Beiyang Government so no. Also bopomofo is an alphabet (seperate characters for consonants and vowels) where as katakana/hiragana are syllabaries

However all three systems are derived from regular Chinese script. Hiragana is derived from cursive Chinese script, Katakana from radicals used as shorthand for certain characters, and Bopomofo from archaic forms of modern characters.