Parallel concepts in different languages

The Equivalence

Outside routine obligations, my time goes to coding, doom-scrolling, hanging out with friends, and reading.

One thing that really struck me from the books I’ve read is that there’s so much parallelism across languages. I’ve only read Mandarin and English, but I strongly suspect this pattern generalizes to adjacent languages too: Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, and probably many more. Mandarin influenced many languages in Asia. English co-evolved with many languages in Europe. So if Mandarin and English already share so many equivalent concepts, it seems reasonable to suspect that many other languages do too.

For almost every concept in Mandarin, whether expressed through proverbs, idioms, or slang, you can find some counterpart in English. And vice versa: for many English proverbs and slang phrases, you can find something close in Mandarin too. Let me give a few concrete examples:

The examples above are old school. But even for newer, constantly changing internet slang, you see the same kind of parallelism. Here’s one very stupid and morally dubious dating example that I saw on both Instagram and Bilibili, which is basically Chinese YouTube:

Instagram: “It’s better to give 20 guys/girls 1 chance each than to give 1 guy/girl 20 chances.”

Bilibili: 给1个他20次机会，不如给20个他1次机会

Which is literally almost word-for-word equivalent.

Sure, in today’s hyper-connected internet age, some of these equivalent ideas probably spread through online exchange. A meme appears in one language, gets translated, mutates, and travels. But I strongly suspect many of these equivalences developed independently long before the internet. People on different continents, speaking different languages, still arrived at similar concepts.

Why Equivalence

Why are there so many equivalences? The food Asian people eat can be very different from European food. The languages sound completely different. Many customs, rituals, and traditions are also wildly different. So why do the concepts rhyme so much?

Well, consider this hypothetical. Suppose SpaceX develops a breakthrough in intergalactic travel today, and billions of humans migrate to faraway galaxies. Then suddenly, all galaxies lose contact with one another. Each galaxy’s humanity develops on its own. What might we end up with?

Probably populations that speak languages that sound totally different. They would eat different food because their planets have different geography. They would develop different customs because random historical events would become sacred traditions over time. Maybe on hotter planets, people’s skin would get darker. On icy planets, people’s skin might get lighter. On ocean planets, people might even develop gills. On planets with less oxygen, people might develop giant nostrils, or even organs to generate air.

Superficial things would diverge: food, language, clothing, rituals, maybe even biology. But what would likely stay the same? Human nature. Unless the planets are extraordinarily different from Earth — like everyone has to live in lava or people can no longer communicate with each other at all — the core human condition would probably remain recognizable. People would still want friendship. People would still betray each other. People would still fall in love, get jealous, seek status, fear death, raise children, chase power, admire courage, hate hypocrisy, and try to make meaning out of suffering.

And because human nature stays mostly the same, each civilization would probably invent many equivalent concepts in its own language. This is admittedly a slight jump in the argument. I can’t fully spell out the step-by-step proof. It’s more of an intuition. But it feels right.

Wait — isn’t this intergalactic migration basically what already happened? Not literally across galaxies, but kind of. For a second, I thought: wasn’t Earth once one giant landmass, then tectonic shifts separated everything, and now we have different populations on different continents speaking different languages? Then I googled and ChatGPT’d a bit to make sure I wasn’t making scientific errors. Turns out I was. Tectonic shifts happened long before humans existed. Humans did not ride the continents apart like passengers on giant stone boats. The actual story is that humans originated in Africa and later migrated outward across the world.

But honestly, that correction makes the idea even cleaner. Humans started from one place, spread into different continents, developed different languages, foods, rituals, and customs, but deep down, we remained the same species facing the same basic problems. Different geography changes the surface. Different history changes the costume. Different language changes the sound. But the underlying drama is still human. We all need to survive. We all need other people. We all suffer from pride, fear, love, ambition, envy, loyalty, betrayal, hope, and regret.

So of course languages contain equivalent concepts. Because beneath Mandarin and English, beneath Asia and Europe, beneath internet slang and ancient proverbs, we are still describing the same animal: humans trying to live.

So What?

Great. But so what? Is the whole point of this essay just to explain why English-speaking Instagram and Chinese Bilibili have the same stupid dating catchphrases?

Yes, that is a point. But that is not the full point. To level up the spiciness of this essay, I want to end with an unserious but mostly true meditation on human nature.

So far, I’ve spent way too many words arguing that shared human nature creates equivalent concepts across languages. Now it is worth asking the deeper question: What is human nature itself?

Across languages, you see concepts like bravery, persistence, ambition, innovation, power, leadership, romance, love, betrayal, disappointment, sadness, loyalty, envy, hope, shame, pride, and so on. These concepts are not random. They are different names for different faces of human nature. So if I want to describe human nature, I need to somehow capture the most important ideas behind these words. Not all of them perfectly, but at least the big ones.

But there are so many concepts about human nature. Where do I even start?

Aha.

We are talking about human nature, right? So why not describe human nature, and the greater human species, from the voice of a nature documentary? Imagine Sir David Attenborough in the latest episode of Planet Earth, except the subject is not African lions, Antarctic penguins, or some tiny poisonous frog with the most dramatic mating ritual known to science. The subject is us: humans.

The apex predator of Earth’s food chain. The dominant engineer of Earth’s ecosystem. A species with intelligence allegedly far above everyone else’s: Homo sapiens.

A creature that builds cities, writes poetry, starts wars, falls in love, betrays its friends, invents gods, launches rockets, doom-scrolls in bed, and then has the audacity to call itself wise.

Here we go. BBC Planet Earth Season 10, Episode 1: Homo sapiens, narrated by Sir Jiaming Liu.

The Great Homo Sapiens

For this part, I wrote out word by word in a sprint and asked ChatGPT "revise grammar but keep it my voice and wording"

You are about to see the greatest species that ever roamed Planet Earth: Homo sapiens. Or, humans, for short.

Humans have existed for less than the most recent 0.01% of Earth’s history, yet in this absurdly short time, they have proved themselves to be a miraculous species. Perhaps the most miraculous species Earth has spawned so far.

This is a Homo sapien. And yes, it is quite strange in many ways.

As a mammal, humans have surprisingly little hair. As predators, humans are physically unimpressive. They cannot outrun cheetahs, overpower tigers, or even beat chimpanzees in raw strength, despite chimpanzees looking like their unemployed cousins. Judged purely by body, Homo sapiens do not look great at all.

But do not be fooled by these fragile, hairless, two-legged mammals. Humans are, somehow, the apex predators of Planet Earth. After migrating out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, humans spread across continents and preyed on almost every animal species they encountered. If there is an animal humans have not killed, it is usually not because humans cannot kill it. It is because they have not met it, not cared enough, or decided to protect it from other humans.

But human dominance does not stop at animals. Homo sapiens are also the only species capable of reshaping Earth itself on a planetary scale. Humans chop down forests, blast through mountains, redirect rivers, dig mines, build cities, and turn wild landscapes into maps of their own desire. They build farmland to make nature produce food on command, factories to mass-produce objects, skyscrapers to stack human life into the clouds, and rockets to escape the planet itself. Once the environment is not enough, humans remake it. Once distance is annoying, humans compress it.

But the true strangeness of Homo sapiens is not just their physical inventions. It is their abstractions. Humans invent law, which tells millions of violent apes to stop hitting each other and file a complaint instead. They invent money, which is imaginary value printed on paper or stored as numbers, and somehow everyone agrees to take it seriously. They invent science, which asks reality questions and forces it to answer without caring about human feelings. They invent religion, which tries to explain why humans exist, why they suffer, and what they should do. They invent art, which is what happens when survival is not enough and the animal wants beauty too.

Really, there is no species on Earth as powerful, sophisticated, ridiculous, or dangerous as Homo sapiens.

But how? How did this physically unimpressive animal rise above every claw, fang, wing, horn, shell, and muscle on Earth and created all the physical and abstract feats?

The answer begins with a powerful biological combination: a large brain, precise hands, and ridiculous stamina. The human brain can imagine things that do not exist, simulate the future, remember the past, guess what other humans are thinking, recognize patterns, tell stories, and make plans. Human hands turn those plans into action: they grip, carve, write, type, cut, code, and build. But humans are not only thinkers and builders. They are also strangely good at continuing. They can walk for hours, run for miles, carry tools across landscapes, track prey, migrate across continents, and just keep going in a way many stronger animals cannot. The brain imagines the spear. The hand makes the spear. The body carries it across the land. The spear kills what the body cannot. That is the basic trick.

Humans are weak animals that learned to outsource strength into tools. A spear extends the claw. A wheel extends the leg. A book extends memory. A computer extends thought. Artificial intelligence may extend intelligence itself. Every tool begins as compensation: humans cannot overpower the tiger, so they build weapons; humans cannot run faster than the horse, so they build vehicles; humans cannot fly, so they build planes; humans cannot remember everything, so they build writing; humans cannot calculate fast enough, so they build computers.

This is the core engine of Homo sapiens: brain creates tool, hand builds tool, tool amplifies human ability, amplified ability creates better tools, and better tools create even greater ability. A loop begins. And the loop accelerates. At first, humans shaped stone. Then they shaped metal. Then they shaped energy. Then they shaped information. Now, they are beginning to shape intelligence itself.

But one human alone could not have done all of this. One human alone cannot invent agriculture, language, law, calculus, engines, vaccines, rockets, and TikTok before dying at age thirty-two from an infected toe. Human greatness depends on collective intelligence: humans communicate, collaborate, teach, copy, and improve on each other. Language lets them coordinate beyond the present moment, talking not just about danger and food, but about yesterday’s tiger, tomorrow’s plan, invisible gods, legal rights, mathematical truths, and family drama. Then humans invented writing, which lets knowledge travel across time. Without writing, knowledge dies with the brain. With writing, a dead human can still teach a living human thousands of years later. This is how education turns individual intelligence into cumulative intelligence: each generation does not restart from zero, but inherits language, math, theories, tools, mistakes, institutions, and homework to complain about.

Then, in the most recent 500 years, this compounding process went completely insane. For thousands of years before that, humans already had cities, empires, writing, agriculture, ships, weapons, and trade. Very impressive. But compared to what happened recently, the previous 4500 years almost look slow. In just a few centuries, humans built machines, harnessed electricity, invented vaccines, nuclear bombs, computers, the internet, rockets, satellites, smartphones, and artificial intelligence. For most of recorded history, even a king was still limited by horses, roads, weather, and human muscle. Now a random teenager can sit in bed, order food, FaceTime someone across the planet, watch a rocket landing, argue with strangers, generate images with AI, and lose money trading options before breakfast. This is the ridiculous acceleration of Homo sapiens: for thousands of years, progress crawled; then suddenly, in the final few pages of the story, everything exploded.

Humans are great because they combine brain, hand, stamina, tool, language, collaboration, education, memory, and imagination into one self-reinforcing system across generations called humanity.

Concepts in Human Nature

Human nature is not some mysterious separate thing floating above biology. Human nature, in particular, the parallel concepts we see across languages, emerges from the same machinery that made Homo sapiens great.

Because humans have brain and thus feelings and imagination, they can think beyond the present moment. This creates concepts like long-term thinking, ambition, anxiety, hope, regret, and the strange ability to suffer from futures that have not happened yet.

Because humans have stamina, they can keep going after exhaustion, which becomes our appreciative concepts of perseverance, discipline, obsession, endurance, and sometimes stubborn stupidity.

Because humans have hands and tools, they can change the world instead of merely accepting it. This creates our concepts of innovation, craftsmanship, control, greed, conquest, and the constant feeling that reality is not enough yet.

Because humans have language, they can share not only facts, but feelings, myths, insults, promises, lies, poetry, laws, and love confessions at 2AM. This creates trust, betrayal, reputation, shame, persuasion, ideology, and drama.

Because humans collaborate, they need each other. This creates friendship, family, loyalty, leadership, romance, sacrifice, jealousy, status games, and hatred. A human alone wants survival. A human among other humans wants recognition.

Because humans educate, each generation inherits the dreams and mistakes of the previous one. This creates tradition, rebellion, progress, resentment, gratitude, and the eternal student feeling that someone dead 500 years ago is still assigning homework.

So that's why all these concepts, regardless of which language is it described in, exist and are so equivalent to each other. Because they all describe the same traits and experience of humanity.

Maybe we should...

So what should we as human beings do with our lives, after thinking all this about what humanity really is? The greatest specifies ever roamed earth, you say, huh?

We should keep doing what makes us great. We should keep imagining, building, learning, teaching, experimenting, collaborating, and making tools that help us become more than what our bodies alone allow us to be.

We should also remember that being powerful is not the same as being good. If humans are the planet-shaping species, then we should care about the planet we are shaping. We should care about other species, because they live under the consequences of our decisions. And we should care about each other, because behind all the tools, laws, money, and technologies, we are still fragile mammals trying to be loved, respected, and understood.

Finally, we need to keep on shaping the future, because we as homo-sapiens are uniquely on earth able to do so, and it would be a shame if we don't make progress.