A disclaimer: This post is about etymology. A coworker of mine is from China and thusly speaks Chinese. As the proud owner of a Duolingo subscription, I have of course dabbled in learning Mandarin. With my coworker’s care and patience, I’ve picked her brain on grammar and vocabulary.

A part of Mandarin I really like is Chengyu. A chengyu is an aphorism comprising 4 glyphs. An example and one of my favorites is 畫蛇添足 (huà shé tiān zú); this means, “to add feet when drawing a snake” or to improve unnecessarily. The important one we spoke about is 夹缝求生 (jiā fèng qiú shēng). This means, “survive in the cracks”. It is pretty in its own right, but I want to dissect the Mandarin work for “to survive”.

The word is 求生 (qiúshēng) comprises the characters for search (求) and life (生). The comparison is 求生 (search life) and the English word survive.

So, survive breaks down into “sur” + “vive”. “sur” is a Latin root meaning over. “vive” coming from “vivere” similarly is Latin for live. So, survive means to “over live” or live over and past other things. The word in its etymology is necessarily adversarial, meaning that the perspective baked into the work is living more than something.

This contrasts to 求生 which breaks down into searching and life. Searching can be a collaborative thing. We can search together with out having to squash those around us.

Fun how etymology can bake in philosophies of individualism versus collectivism.