“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein
I am immensely fascinated by language as a concept. Communication as a feat of biology is an awe inspiring thing to arise by itself, but the complexity and nuance by which our human flavor of communication has developed is absolutely mind bending to me.
I am solidly an “Uni-glot” in that I am temporarily confined to my native language of English; but I am working on that. Before I die, I would like to learn at least 3 - 4 languages to conversational fluency from the Proto-Indo European family tree, and maybe one or two from another linguistic tree.
I have been loosely studying Russian for a few years, and I can certainly understand it more than I can speak it. The language itself is so different from English and retains many of its “Latin like” declensions. Moreover, there is something magical and hidden deep inside the Russian language that I have only caught glimpses of on occasion. Its like looking through a window into another reality. It conveys a culture and artistic style that is not expressible or reproducible in English. If I can progress further along to writing in the language, maybe I will add some notes entirely in Russian. It would be good practice to think about complex targets from a new linguistic perspective.