Interesting and well-illustrated article. The claim that Japanese (or any other language) totally unique is a romantic one, showing the ignorance of the author with the very wide variety of languages and writing systems (the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language).
For example, they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana). There are many examples of similar use in the languages, one that I'm familiar with is the use of determinatives in Ancient Egypt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative). Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification. If you want phonetic clarification, examples are even more numerous, e.g. the use of shaddah in Arabic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaddah).
The idea expressed in the "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc.
For example, they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana). There are many examples of similar use in the languages, one that I'm familiar with is the use of determinatives in Ancient Egypt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative). Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification. If you want phonetic clarification, examples are even more numerous, e.g. the use of shaddah in Arabic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaddah).
The idea expressed in the "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc.
The part that I find really interesting about Japanese is it's well-developed system of honorifics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese).