Interesting, has anyone ever thought about where the language origins of each organ in Chinese come from? Are the kidneys in ancient Chinese and modern Chinese the same thing? The names of organs in today's Chinese come from the Warring States period text *Huangdi Neijing* (The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon), which describes the five viscera and six bowels. But in modern medicine, these are different concepts—they just share the same names, a result of lazy translations during the late Qing dynasty and early Republican era. In ancient Chinese systems, the kidneys were responsible for managing sex hormones, which is why there’s the concept of kidney deficiency. But modern kidneys don’t handle these functions. People often say that anger harms the liver, which is because in traditional Chinese medicine, the liver is believed to manage emotions. However, in modern medicine, the liver is simply an organ for excretion and has nothing to do with emotions. Saussure believed that linguistic signs are historical products, not logical ones. So when Western medicine was introduced to China, translators took the easy way out and directly borrowed ancient organ names instead of creating new terms. As a result, two completely different civilizations, eras, and scientific systems suddenly ended up sharing the same set of "signifiers," but with entirely different "signifieds." This linguistic phenomenon is called "signifier overlap," a classic source of misunderstanding in linguistics. To put it simply, in Chinese medical language, there are two parallel worlds sharing the same dictionary. (Two semantic universes sharing the same lexicon.) There’s an interesting rule in the history of science: when a new science enters an old civilization, the old civilization uses existing words to translate new concepts, leading to "semantic residue." This explains why Chinese medical terminology is so confusing—because the "words" come from traditional Chinese medicine, while the "meanings" come from Western medicine, creating a huge disconnect in between. Content above assisted by GPT.