Abstract
The departing point of the polemically tuned article is the criticism of the approach of A. Cheng, the author of the influential and otherwise very good survey History of Chinese Thought, towards Chinese languae and writing.
The author of the article explains in which regards this view contradicts the present stage of knowledge in the field of Chinese linguistics, but also of history of literature and culture. He demonstrates this on examples.
Then he deals with the problems of the traditional approaches on the background of the present Western linguistics of Chinese, general linguistics and linguistic anthropology, and proposes a potentially fruitful direction for the future research of the relationship between Chinese language and thought.