Well I know that the vietnamese alphabet was devised by French Jesuit
missionaries in the late 1700's, mainly because the spoken vietnamese is a
distant variant of chinese and they couldn't deal well with the characters.
So to translate the Bible, they invented an alphabet that looks alot like
the westen one. It has 24 letters and seven diacritical marks. Just enough
to make it look readable to a westener, but not enough to make it
pronouncable. ;-)
--johnboy