> The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined… The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

—Albert Einstein

Quoted in Using Spaced Repetition Systems to See Through a Piece of Mathematics,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895613

which describes the author's experience that if you approach a field obsessively enough, eventually you begin to understand it at a level deeper than language.

If an LLM is big enough, I imagine something similar is happening.