That is a great question. I've emailed your post to linguafranca@ in hopes that they answer it with a blog post. I just got back from a three-week vacation in

That is a great question. I've emailed your post to linguafranca@ in hopes that they answer it with a blog post. I just got back from a three-week vacation in China and I still don't feel informed enough to know the answer to that. There are a couple forms of pinyin, where you can write chinese words in latin script. For example, "Wo Shi Mei Guo Ren" is "I am an American." (literal translation: "I am beautiful land people".) But most Chinese don't know pinyin, and don't make efforts to use it as an alternative.