Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
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Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
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Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
#2If anyone wants a book that lays a lot of the foundation for this line of thought, do check out Language, Thought, and Reality by Benjamin Lee Whorf. It's accessible, but brilliant.
Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
#3If anyone wants a book that lays a lot of the foundation for this line of thought, do check out Language, Thought, and Reality by Benjamin Lee Whorf. It's accessible, but brilliant.
Ah, yes, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis => https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
#4If anyone wants a book that lays a lot of the foundation for this line of thought, do check out Language, Thought, and Reality by Benjamin Lee Whorf. It's accessible, but brilliant.
Ah, yes, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis => https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
As a multilingual and multicultural person, I experience this daily. When I want to think about emotional things or intimate relationships, I think in Spanish. When I want to do math, I think in English. Engineering is in English. Social analysis in Spanish.
English is my primary language and I learned Spanish in my 40s. But many things work much better in Spanish, so I do them in Spanish. In my experience , language absolutely influences your thoughts and your values.
I have an entire identity in Spanish that contains many relationships. If I think about or talk about those people in English, it is as if I am talking about someone I barely know. It is really odd, actually.
Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
#5I'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 said it better than I can is this video:
Learning Languages Ruined My Life
Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
#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 most European languages, especially the popular ones, don't have a system like that as a mandatory part of their grammar.
> In Tibetan, there is an honorific language that goes beyond the French vous or the Spanish usted. Rather than conjugating the verbs differently to indicate politeness, many words are modified, or can even be entirely different, to indicate honor itself. For instance, you can have a regular picture (par) or an honorific picture (kupar) of, say, your lama. There’s even a way to talk about an honorific dog. However, you never use honorific language when talking about yourself. Instead, you can use humble language to help you decrease your sense of ego importance.
Honorifics are also common in many other languages. Japanese also commonly use noun prefixes (especially "o-" and "go-"), while Korean has honorific versions of some particles (e.g. the subject marker "-i/-ga" turns into "-kkeseo". Korean also has many speech formality levels (at least 7 different levels AFAIK), while Japanese has 3 or 4. Both languages have a highly developed system of plain, honorific and humble verbs, where most verbs are modified in a regular manner, but some common verbs are completely replaced by another verb for the honorific or humble version. Tibetan also seems to have a honorific verb system, but I don't know if it's as developed as the ones in Japanese and Korean.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality
[2] https://wals.info/chapter/77 - WALS is not extremely accurate and in my experience it tends to overestimate features that are not fully grammaticalized, but I think it is safe to assume at least 50 out of the 418 languages languages have an evidential system that is as developed as Tibetan's.
Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
#7My understanding is that Chomsky formally proved that this is impossible, ie all languages are exactly equal.
Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, yes, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis => https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
As a multilingual and multicultural person, I experience this daily. When I want to think about emotional things or intimate relationships, I think in Spanish. When I want to do math, I think in English. Engineering is in English. Social analysis in Spanish. English is my primary language and I learned Spanish in my 40s. But many things work much better in Spanish, so I do them in Spanish. In my experience , language…
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.
Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, yes, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis => https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
As a multilingual and multicultural person, I experience this daily. When I want to think about emotional things or intimate relationships, I think in Spanish. When I want to do math, I think in English. Engineering is in English. Social analysis in Spanish. English is my primary language and I learned Spanish in my 40s. But many things work much better in Spanish, so I do them in Spanish. In my experience , language…
and when you can't remember the word for something, but you are thinking of the thing, what language is that?
Re: Learning Tibetan changed the way I think (2023)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a multilingual and multicultural person, I experience this daily. When I want to think about emotional things or intimate relationships, I think in Spanish. When I want to do math, I think in English. Engineering is in English. Social analysis in Spanish. English is my primary language and I learned Spanish in my 40s. But many things work much better in Spanish, so I do them in Spanish. In my experience , language…
and when you can't remember the word for something, but you are thinking of the thing, what language is that?
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