what caused such a variety in asian languages and lettering systems?

thai script is brahmic in origin, viet script got PORTUGAL'D, korean script was reformed in the middle ages

>>1406936
>viet script got PORTUGAL'D
French'd

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Rome. There used to be a bunch of other alphabets descended from Greek, Runic, Gothic, continental Celtic, Ogham, many Italic scripts, Etruscan, Glagolitic, Iberian... But those fell into disuse through the Empire's and later the Church's influence. With the printing press the Latin alphabet was even further standarised. But outside western Europe you still have Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, hell Georgian has three alphabets all to itself.

As for Asia, the situation isn't all that different. The Islamic regions almost invariably use Arabic, Cyrillic or Latin. India and Indochina have distinct alphabet for different languages, but like with the older European scripts they all have a common root. Hangul and Kana developped because Chinese character are horrible for writing anything that isn't Chinese, and through the influence of other scripts. Mongolia is an interesting case, since they have a bunch of native scripts (also sometimes used for neighbouring languages) which descend from Sogdian and are a branch of alphabets which don't survive otherwise; in any case Mongolian is often written in Cyrillic too.

As for linguistic variation, most languages in Europe are descended from Indo-European, so it isn't a surprise they're similar to a degree; Indo-Iranian languages also share a genetic origin with them. Most of the Middle East (North Africa included) speaks Arabic. Central and Northern Asia are Turkic languages or minority languages being displaced by Russian, save for (again) Mongolian. Maritime SEA is all Austronesian, which is one big family extending from Madagascar to Polynesia; continential SEA is either Austroasiatic (Vietnam, Cambodia) or Tai-Kadai (Laos, Thailand). Again Japan and Korea have their own languages thanks to isolation; China is mostly Sino-Tibetan languages being dominated by Chienese. In South India you have the Dravidian family. The Caucasus is a huge clusterfuck.

cont.

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>>1407021
Nowadays in Europe the only languages that aren't Indo-European are Basque (which is it's own thing) and Estonian, Finnish, Sami and Hungarian, which are Uralic languages whose closest relatives are among those aforementioned minority languages in Russia.

The sad truth is that linguistic variation is a pretty frail thing. People tend to adopt what is convenient unless given a good reason not to, and often they will have good reasons (violence) to adopt the tongue of the hegemonic power. It's not really something that is particular to Europe, look around a bit and you'll see how languages like Persian have gone through three completely different scripts through the centuries; Turkic languages had their own rune-like scripts which were displaced by Arabic and then Latin/Cyrillic; maritime SEA went through something similar.

It's funny to think the Babel twer story is actually completely backwards, and ancient humans actually were much more linguistically diverse--look at places like Papua or the Amazon, where pretty much ever tribe has its own language and people need to be plurilingual to communicate between cmmunities.

Vietnamese and Korean used to be written in Chinese characters (e.g. chữ nôm and hanja) as well as Japanese before the development of Japanese syllabaries. Some of the nomadic peoples such as the Khitan and the Mongols have used Chinese characters to write their language.
Most of the South East Asian scripts including the ancient Kawi scripts are derived from Bhramic scripts.

Europe also had quite a bit of variation before the spread of Latin with Futhark, Gothic, and the various Iberian scripts. There's also the Georgian and Armenian scripts.

>>1406809
Hangul and Hiragana were derived from Hanzi. Further, pretty much everyone was using Hanzi (Hanja, Kanji) up until the 1900s.

Also, Hanzi are not ideographic.