To abuse the idea in the article, you could imagine the layers I mentioned in the brain are various stages of a thought compiler, and English is one front-end. In this analogy, C/Java/whatever are the "thought" and linked executables / bytecode bundles are the "words".
Some languages share more intermediate compiler stages than others (Latin, Italian, French) whereas share a lot fewer (English and Japanese come to mind).
One thing I like about this formulation is that humanity doesn't all need to have the same meat / "hardware" in their brains at the bottom layer (which is kind of unsatisfying and less-plausible, and makes me think of 2001: A Space Odyssey), as long as there is interoperability at the highest layer.
Some languages share more intermediate compiler stages than others (Latin, Italian, French) whereas share a lot fewer (English and Japanese come to mind).
One thing I like about this formulation is that humanity doesn't all need to have the same meat / "hardware" in their brains at the bottom layer (which is kind of unsatisfying and less-plausible, and makes me think of 2001: A Space Odyssey), as long as there is interoperability at the highest layer.