Sorry. I must contain myself better. ;-)
> >Note that some systems spread "better" than others.
>
> I suspect that Western has an advantage here; I'm guessing its very
> regular.
Depends what you mean by regular. If Western were logographic or syllabic, it'd be distinctly limited in this regard. If it were a genuinely consistently phonetic alphabet, that's about the best starting point. Then you only have to worry about sounds you don't have letters for, phonic distinctions different languages do or do not make, stress, tone, and all that stuff. (Western as IPA?)
> But Japanese writing is very conciously derived from Chinese. And
> heavily modified to meet the needs of the language.
Heavily unmodified. Kanji makes brutally few concessions to the realities of Japanese as a language, for which it's much less well suited than Chinese, in many respects. You may counter that this means that there _are_ instances where a logographic script is used where logic indicates that it ought not to be, but "borrowing" a full-fledged script from a neighbour is a very different case than actually _developing_ such a script, where local conditions don't suit.
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