How to Write a Vowel Differently

In Lao, there are five different ways to write a particular sound. Your choice of consonant to mark that tells you what tone to use for the vowel. In Mandarin, which has crazy vowels, it's god awful hard to understand. But it's probably easier to remember if you spell it differently rather than just throwing some dots and lines of vowels. We obviously prefer some over others because we live in a world with Unicode.