Numbers In Chinese Characters Cultural Studies

The numeral and the modern life is closely linked. With the invention of computer and widespread usage of the digital technology in life, human beings are gradually entering a digitized age. The numeral has received the unprecedented attention and favor. However, for a long time people studied numerals mainly in mathematics. In fact, the numeral is also part of Chinese character and it has the same important research value as Chinese character in the study of Chinese graphology.This paper is to study the numeral culture which belongs to one category of Chinese graphology — Chinese character culturology. The Chinese character cultural science is an interdisciplinary subject of Chinese character study and the cultural science. It mainly studies the cultural connotation of Chinese character as a symbolism and the relations between Chinese character and Chinese culture.The research of numeral culture in Chinese character is also an interdisciplinary subject as the study of Chinese character culturology. This is a kind of intersectional research topic that studies the numerals in Chinese character and the numeral culture. Its purposes are: First, it expounds the cultural significance of the numeral as a symbolism and information system; second, it discusses the relations between numerals and Chinese culture. That is to say, this paper will mainly study culture from the perspective of numerals in Chinese character, and the numeral in Chinese character from culture.This paper starts with the origin of numeral to analyze how did human being come up with the thought of numeral and how did the hominid take count and how did the sign of count become numbers. This paper presents the original meaning of each Chinese character used to represent the number as well. It also studies the relationship between the capitalization and non-capitalization of numeral and put them into the Chinese cultural accumulations of a history of thousands of years. This paper expands the connotation of the numbers within ten and some of the representative numerals in Chinese traditional culture and analyzes how did the historical headstream of cultural connotation come into being. Besides, it studies some special purposes of the numeral, such as: numeral language, magical function of numeral in poem and so on. This paper analyzes and expands cultural connotation of numeral in Chinese characters based on others' research achievement that enables the readers to understand the culture of numeral in Chinese characters completely.