Chinese Characters, Chinese Culture and Chinese Mind

Writing forms whether in terms of Chinese characters and Chinese ideographs, phonetic alphabet or numeric systems – are created by and thus reflect culture, mind, and social reality. In turn, these writing forms exert great impact on the culture and mind of their users. This article contends that in addition to the cultural content that the Chinese writing system conveys, the media of Chinese characters and alphabet themselves may very likely act like mathematical notations and consequently function as a processing system. Such a system has a strong impact on the mind, culture, and even the brain structures of their users. Chinese characters, for example, due to their unique physical properties rather than the cultural content loaded in them due to their pictographic and ideographic nature, have helped for thousands of years to organize and shape the Chinese mind just as language does. The argument of this paper is that our mind shapes our writing forms (the media) and in turn they shape our mind. As the writing forms are different, they may have helped to shape, at least to some degree, a different mind. Introduction The culture of a given society shapes its writing or orthographic system § according to the features of its language. The writing system, in turn, influences the culture which creates it. On the one hand, orthography as a reflection of language reflects its own cultural environment, especially the prevalent mode of thought. On the other hand, as an active force, it promotes and reinforces its socio-cultural reality, the established mode of thought in particular. According to this assumption, the pictographic and ideographic writing system of the Chinese, which has evolved over three thousand years and still retains its genetic relationship with its original form, may have acted as a powerful agent, affecting its culture and thought patterns, and even the organization of the function of the brain through inducing unique specialization in the reading brain. This essay further assumes that the formation of typical structure of pictographic and phonetic compounds with the pictographic radicals placed on the left, roughly indicating meaning and phonetic radicals placed on the right, roughly indicating pronunciation, is the outcome of the interaction between the Chinese characters and the brain. This compound structure represents the main body of Chinese characters. However, how this structure was formed and developed until it became the main body still remains a question. This paper sets forth a very tentative resolution of this mystery.