Rubets, M. V. Cognitive Peculiarities of Chinese Culture and Language

Abstract: The author of the article discusses the origin of atomistic concepts from the point of view of intercultural studies. The article is devoted to researching the phenomena of Chinese culture, in particular, the Chinese verbal and written languages. The analysis is based on the cognitive approach described in I. Merkulov’s researches. Based on the examples from the Chinese verbal and written languages, the author of the article shows that Chinese people have a singular type of cogitation — mostly spatial-image (‘dextrocerebral’) thinking which is related to archaic cogitation. The author describes structures and types of hieroglyphs and demonstrates the examples of influence of hieroglyph “images’ on cultural occurrences in architecture, education, Internet communication and etc. The author also analyzes typical examples depicting the dependence of use of the words from the nature of percept images denoted by these words. The author also compares these features with the languages of modern primitive populations. Based on the examples from the Chinese language and culture the author makes a conclusion that Chinese people in general have a holistic and concrete world outlook and it is not typical for them to divide something whole into parts. This conclusion correlates with A. I. Kobzeva’s assumption that the idea of atomism was alien to Chinese people who represented the “dextrocerebral” psychological type.

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