I speak Serbian, English and Norwegian. Lately, I’ve been learning Spanish, and a bit before I started, I put Hebrew (which intrigued me for many years) and Macedonian (which is closely similar to Serbian) on pause.
15 years ago, in what now seems like a ‘previous life’, I came to Belgrade from a small town in West Serbia and enrolled in a BSc in ‘Scandinavian languages, literatures and cultures’ with Norwegian as the main language.
Today, in 2026 and the world of LLMs, Chinese universities dropping humanities and especially languages and translation, combined with my own bubble of working with technology and products and sometimes reminiscing about languages and college times… I get this weird existential crisis.
I’ve always thought of learning a new language less as picking up a utility and more as installing a new operating system for thought. I believe that every language solves the problem of human experience slightly differently, carving up reality, emotion, and perception with its own distinct geometry.
I’d like to write about the beauty of these geometries.
Building Blocks and Beauty of the North
Take Scandinavian languages (or other non-English Germanic languages). While English often relies on loose phrases, they have an architectural elegance in their compound nouns (sammensatte ord). There is an almost tactile satisfaction in snapping two concepts together to build a third. It often yields an unexpected poetry.
Take the Norwegian word for absence: fraværelse. Literally a “from-being” treating someone’s missing presence as an active state rather than an empty void. Consider tilbakefall (a relapse, but rendered physically as a literal “fall back”), or describing something extraordinary as fremragende, standing out, leaning forward into the room. Even time becomes sculptural: an øyeblikk isn’t an abstract moment; it is literally the “blink of an eye”.
Obviously, sometimes it is purely practical like “fatherfather” and “motherfather” for grandfather on your father’s or mother’s side. But even this practicality is beautiful.
The Nice Moments with Spanish, Macedonian, or Hebrew
I’m just a beginner in these three and know far less than when it comes to Norwegian, but I still know enough to have these nice small discoveries.
Spanish has two “I Love You”s, te quiero and te amo, which distinguish between nuances of love that English blurs into a single verb (‘love’). They also have different (emotional) states differentiated by the cause, like being sleepless because of something and not ‘just’ sleepless/tired.
Hebrew builds an entire universe out of three-letter roots. You take the root K-T-V (related to writing) and watch it derive katav (he wrote), michtav (a letter), ktovet (an address), and michtava (a writing desk). It also has “compounding” similar to the Nordic languages with beit sefer (‘house of books’ for school) gan yeladim (‘garden of kids’ for kindergarten [note the same metaphor in the Germanic kindergarten])…
Macedonian has articles, and not only that, but, interestingly, a three-way spatial article. Мачка (mačka), ‘a cat’ (indefinite, unspecified). Мачката (mačkata) ‘the cat’ (definite, neutral). Мачкава (mačkava), ‘the cat’ but right here, e.g. in your lap. Мачкана (mačkana), ‘the cat’ but further away, e.g. across the street or sitting far in the distance).
Cognitive Semantics…
Instead of treating language as an isolated set of formal rules or a disembodied dictionary, cognitive semantics views grammar and vocabulary as direct reflections of general human cognition.
How we categorize, frame, and structure ideas is inextricably linked to perception, attention and memory. When Macedonian encodes spatial proximity directly into noun endings, or when Germanic languages compound concrete elements to forge an abstract concept, they aren’t just deploying syntax or morphology; they are revealing the mental models we construct to navigate reality.
…and Embodied Logic: When Thought Takes Physical Shape
This can be a mind-blowing one. Pioneered by George Lakoff, this premise is striking: our minds do not process pure, disembodied abstractions in a vacuum. Instead, we map complex, intangible ideas onto the physical physics of our bodies and spatial orientation. When Norwegian turns a relapse into a literal “fall backward” (tilbakefall), when Serbian feels a heavy “stone fall from the heart” (pao kamen sa srca), or when Hebrew asks you to physically “place your heart” onto what matters (sim lev), grammar is revealing its somatic roots.
Wrapping Up (and ChatGPT 🤖)
Linguists have spent decades debating just how deeply all of this affects our brains. (It’s been 15 years since I studied this, so it’s obviously more of an emotional/romantic moment-sharing than a scientific contribution.)
On one end we have Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the tantalizing idea that the structure of our language shapes how we perceive and categorize the world. Does speaking a language with fraværelse, make you experience absence more vividly? Do Macedonian ‘space’ articles make you be more or differently aware of spatial relations?
On the other end stands Chomsky and the conviction that underneath the surface diversity of compounds, roots, and inflections lies a hardwired, universal computational architecture shared by all human minds.
When Large Language Models learn human speech, they turn words into coordinates on a shared map. In that sense, every language follows a remarkably similar skeleton, almost like Chomsky’s universal grammar in action. But zoom in, and you see the Sapir-Whorf effect: words like amor, tilbakefall, or beit sefer carry their own local gravity, sitting closer to ideas that only make sense in that particular culture.
Wrapping Up (For Real)
Whether through an algebraic root, a mathematical embedding, a single compounded word, or some magical process we don’t understand, we are all just running algorithms to describe what it feels like to exist…
I hope this blog post tickled your imagination… Anyhow, learning a language is good for you. So go do your Duolingo, talk to a foreign friend or pen pal, and enjoy the ride.
Featured image generated with AI; Text rephrased and shaped with AI