Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

lionsroar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 90 posts

Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

#41

Post by rramadass »

yongjik wrote: post #29

I think the author is overthinking about Tibetan to create a story. For example: > Tibetan language has shaped the way I think and look at life. Even simple, everyday words such as “hello” and “thank you” have taken on a new, more profound meaning. The Tibetan greeting of “tashi delek” means “may everything be auspicious.” An expression of thanks, “tug je che,” means “great compassion.” You can say the same thing for…

> I think the author is overthinking about Tibetan to create a story.

Maybe, Maybe Not.

Because of the permeation of Buddhist philosophies throughout Tibetan Culture and the harshness of their living environment they developed a system of "Mind Training" aka "Lojong" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojong) to train themselves to adapt using various attitudes, aphorisms, sayings etc. and expressed verbally through language. This most certainly has bled into everyday usage amongst common folk which is what i suspect the author picked up on.

Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

#42

Post by Tor3 »

unscaled wrote: post #30
BobaFloutist wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth mentioning that although English doesn't explicitly require you do do any of this, we generally have ways of conveying respect/familiarity (by tweaking the formality of our register).

Roman Jakobson (probably one of the most important linguists of the 20th century) has famously said: "Languages essentially differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they can convey". I think this sums up the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis quite well. The strong version of the hypothesis claims that monolingual speakers of a certain language find it hard to think of concepts that cannot…

>That pretty clearly forces every Guugu Yimithirr speaker to have to be constantly aware of the compass directions so they can clearly point at things, it's quite unsurprising that they are very good in instinctively knowing where the north is without a compass.

Apparently you can't even greet someone unless you know the cardinal directions - an article I read in New Scientist claimed that a greeting is essentially telling which direction you came from and in which you are headed.

Be that as it may, I can easily believe that this feature of the language forces you to keep track of directions, after something I experienced: I was always good at keeping track of directions myself, I could walk around in sunless cities for hours and always know which direction I should go to get back to where I started. I could do this while driving too (I also traveled to other countries and drove around in many unfamiliar cities).

But then GPS navigation systems arrived. Convenient, I thought. Until I realized I had completely stopped tracking cardinal directions unconsciously. I haven't used car navigation since that hit me, and it was actually hard to get back into the habit of keeping track of where I am. I'm not sure I will ever again be as good as I used to be.

Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

#43

Post by Tor3 »

nine_k wrote: post #24
FredPret wrote: post #12

I learned English and honestly the only thing that happened was my life got 100 times better socially and professionally. My thinking is exactly the same. The only cognitive skills I've noticed improving is my ability to play word games and figure out simple phrases in third languages when traveling, because I have two languages to reference when thinking about word origins and relationships.

Is your first language Germanic? Romance? Indo-European at all? The difference with English may be not stark enough to make you notice a different point of view. Compared to English, say, Spanish has forms of verb so detailed that a single word expresses aspects that require a whole phrase in English: "venceremos" = "we will prevail", or "quisiera" = "I would like". You cannot opt out of this level of detail. Also in…

As for Japanese, the by far more important difference is, in my opinion, that the verb comes last. Imagine an automatic Star Trek Universal Translator feature: Can't happen. You can't translate the sentence as it's being spoken, you have to wait until the last word before you can get past the subject if you're translating to English.

What this means in practice is something you'll have to watch for to notice: It's far more common for Japanese people not to reply until the other party has finished the sentence. Because, depending on context, the verb is important. Important parts happens at the end of the sentence, while in my own language important things are at the beginning of the sentence and the remainder is just fluff, so it's extremely common to hear people communicate in overlapping patterns - you start replying mid-sentence (and the other party automatically stops because the point has already been made so it's fine). This is something which absolutely infuriates my Japanese wife, even though she speaks my language nearly perfectly. She can't get out of the habit of expecting people to wait until the very end, even though as far as the other party is concerned everything is already clear.

But this does instill a good habit - there's way less interruptions. Because when you learn your pattern of replying mid-sentence, sometimes you do miss the real point. And more.

Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

#44

Post by bloak »

deepsun wrote: post #39
unscaled wrote: post #6

> When talking about someone or something external to you, Tibetan grammar forces you to express whether what you’re talking about is something you’ve experienced or seen with your own eyes, whether it’s an assumption you’re making, or if it’s something that is generally true to everyone else. The grammatical category the author describes here is called Evidentiality[1], and it's surprisingly rather common[2], but mo…

Typical example in some slavic languages: singular/plural versions of "you". In official speech one almost never says singular "you" even to a single person -- instead using honorific plural "you". I wonder if it was probably the same in English, just at some point people became all too polite and stopped using "thou".

Yes. And some Quakers were offended by all this unnecessary politeness and continued to use "thou" for a couple of centuries. So English and French used plural "you" for politeness, and so did German at one point, but modern German uses "they" as a polite "you", and so does Italian, I think. So there was an international trend to avoid singular "you" when being polite. But recently in Sweden (1960s/1970s) they've gone back to universal use of singular "you", which seems like a good thing to me, though it's presumably too late for English, despite the holdouts in Yorkshire.

Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

#45

Post by Tor3 »

lxgr wrote: post #28
armitron wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the everyday sense of self that you have if not a linguistic construct? Without language and higher order thinking, you'd be back to being an ape. Modern life drenched in information flows, much more so than the past, accellerates our fragmentation into multiple personalities.

Language and higher order thinking might not be as intrinsically related as we think. For example, not everybody has an inner voice – and this usually comes as a surprise to both people having or not having one. Another good counterexample might actually be LLMs: Definitely well-spoken, definitely still not the greatest abstract higher-order thinkers, and domain-specific “intelligences” run circles around them.

I have an inner voice when I think about dialogue. When I construct a discussion in my mind. And only then.

I don't use an inner voice when I think about other things, how to do things, or figure out problems. Way too slow, and after all you can't use an inner voice to figure out how to get through a tricky four-car driving situation. You have to figure out what do do by entirely non-verbal means.

Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

#46

Post by sinuhe69 »

yongjik wrote: post #29

I think the author is overthinking about Tibetan to create a story. For example: > Tibetan language has shaped the way I think and look at life. Even simple, everyday words such as “hello” and “thank you” have taken on a new, more profound meaning. The Tibetan greeting of “tashi delek” means “may everything be auspicious.” An expression of thanks, “tug je che,” means “great compassion.” You can say the same thing for…

Well, the beauty is always in the eyes of the beholder. Maybe you can experience something new about your language as well once you learn to think in author's way.

For me, it's all extremely fascinating and inspire a lot of of questions!

Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

#47

Post by anal_reactor »

JoeDaDude wrote: post #5

I'm sure language learners all over have felt this way. Once one starts learning another tongue, one realizes that languages do not exist in isolation, they are part of a larger culture and the language comes with customs, traditions, norms, and even beliefs from that culture. In learning a language, you internalize that culture and, even if just a tiny bit, develop an identity as a member of that culture. Phoenix Ho…

My problem is that I love languages but I hate people, which makes me completely half-ass the learning process by detaching the language from the culture.

Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

#48

Post by Tor3 »

bloak wrote: post #44
deepsun wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical example in some slavic languages: singular/plural versions of "you". In official speech one almost never says singular "you" even to a single person -- instead using honorific plural "you". I wonder if it was probably the same in English, just at some point people became all too polite and stopped using "thou".

Yes. And some Quakers were offended by all this unnecessary politeness and continued to use "thou" for a couple of centuries. So English and French used plural "you" for politeness, and so did German at one point, but modern German uses "they" as a polite "you", and so does Italian, I think. So there was an international trend to avoid singular "you" when being polite. But recently in Sweden (1960s/1970s) they've gon…

In Norway the switch happened almost overnight, approximately 1980. Good riddance, the plural polite forms didn't exist in my dialect anyway and it always sounded extremely cringy when somebody tried to use those forms in dialects which didn't have them.

I always say that it's not the words you use which matters for politeness, it's how you say them.

Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

#49

Post by DiscourseFan »

anal_reactor wrote: post #47
JoeDaDude wrote: post #5

I'm sure language learners all over have felt this way. Once one starts learning another tongue, one realizes that languages do not exist in isolation, they are part of a larger culture and the language comes with customs, traditions, norms, and even beliefs from that culture. In learning a language, you internalize that culture and, even if just a tiny bit, develop an identity as a member of that culture. Phoenix Ho…

My problem is that I love languages but I hate people, which makes me completely half-ass the learning process by detaching the language from the culture.

Its more likely that you hate what you see in people than the people themselves.

Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)

#50

Post by DiscourseFan »

rramadass wrote: post #13
JoeDaDude wrote: post #5

I'm sure language learners all over have felt this way. Once one starts learning another tongue, one realizes that languages do not exist in isolation, they are part of a larger culture and the language comes with customs, traditions, norms, and even beliefs from that culture. In learning a language, you internalize that culture and, even if just a tiny bit, develop an identity as a member of that culture. Phoenix Ho…

Very True. This is particularly true when one translates/studies philosophical texts where there are lots of abstract concepts to interpret and more often than not if one doesn't understand the culture and everything it entails, one will make a mess of it. > In learning a language, you internalize that culture and, even if just a tiny bit, develop an identity as a member of that culture. This actually explains how In…

Indian philosophy is not translingual though, its all written in one language, Sanskrit, and translated from that language. If anything, Indian philosophy demonstrates hierarchal dominance in its cultural context.
Post reply on HN