Chinese ideographic writing as a picture of the world: theoretical approach

¹ Irkutsk State University, 664003 Irkutsk, Russia
² MGIMO University, 119454 Moscow, Russia

^* Corresponding author: domashevskayad@gmail.com

Abstract

The paper deals with an ideographic writing presented from the standpoint of systems theory, grammatology and semiotics. Ideographic writing is regarded as a natural linguistic semiotic system with its own picture of the world.Ideographic writing as a spacereflects a whole set of writing signs as the ethno-linguistic and cultural reflection of the external physical space of the world and its fixation in the graphic component of the semiosphere as they are perceived by the Chinese ethnic group. Writing as a system focuses on the hierarchical and structural aspects, on establishing its semiographic framework, formation and interpretation models of character components. Ideographic writing as a picture of the world has a semiographic framework that reveals types of knowledge structures that can be seen behind the structure of the characters. The ideographic picture of the world forms a graphic metamodel of Chinese ethno-linguistic semiosphere. Authors propose a graphic metamodel of ideographic writing system based on the semiographic approach. This approach is applied to represent a semiographic framework of the Chinese ideographic writing space, a framework that consists of 540 bushou systematised by Xu Shen in the first Chinese dictionary “Shuo wen jie zi”.