[curioussquirrel]

I am fairly convinced that there's a certain polyglot snowball effect: once the LLM is fluent in 20 languages, it can pick up on similarities in vocabulary, syntax etc. and learn the 21st language with much less effort (and training data). This might be difficult to actually study in an isolated way, but it's a real effect for humans and it makes sense the the pattern matchers that LLMs are would find these shortcuts.

Using similar words should land you in similar places in the latent space, even if they actual word or their order is slightly different. Where it gets interesting is how well English words map to their counterparts in other languages, and what practical differences it makes. From various studies, it seems that the gravitational pull of English language/culture training data is substantial, but an LLM can switch cultures and values when prompted in different languages.