For context, to forestall some knee jerk reactions I'm seeing: 1. This essay is part of a series, where guest authors are explicitly asked to "uninvent" someth

For context, to forestall some knee jerk reactions I'm seeing: 1. This essay is part of a series, where guest authors are explicitly asked to "uninvent" something. So there's a level of built-in hot take to this. 2. The author is Ted Chiang, writer of Story of Your Life (and the work that the movie Arrival was based on). He's explored how language affects how we think before (Story of Your Life/Arrival is explicitly about this). So this kind of falls in line with that. Anyway, I think this is a fascinating thought experiment to work through. What would China be like with a phonetic system? What would change? How much of the culture is derived from the method of language and how much from other factors?