The Word-Formation and Thought Patterns of Naxi Dongba Script
This 2016 article by Zeng Xiaopeng argues that the pictographic characters of Naxi Dongba script reveal the cognitive patterns of the people who created them. Drawing on examples of nature, plant, animal, implement, and religious characters, the author shows that Dongba script is fundamentally image-based (pictorial, multiple, and concrete in its forms), yet already displays a developing capacity for abstraction: state and attribute categories, color terms following a Berlin-and-Kay-style hierarchy, numerals, and the replacement of concrete objects by abstract symbols such as circles. It also traces how character meanings expanded metaphorically (e.g., 'tail' extending to mean the low end of anything) and how Dongba cosmology, reflected in the characters for 'sky,' 'house,' and 'mountain,' derives from the Naxi ancestors' nomadic tent-dwelling life. The study concludes that image-based and abstract thinking developed together in Dongba script's evolution.
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