hckrnws
> 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.
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 be expressed by their language. But as Roman Jakobson hints, with enough effort you can express most concepts in most languages. Quite frankly, I'm not aware of any evidence of this strong form of linguistic determinism, except for Daniel Everett's research of Pirahã[1], which is rather controversial.
The weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is more interesting, but most of the research I've seen was on pretty boring (in my opinion) subjects that seem to appeal to a modern European audience. In other words, it's mostly about color and grammatical gender (obviously only when that gender is Masculine, Feminine and Neuter, not something too foreign like Bantu noun classes).
The most interesting research I remember reading was on the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr, which uses a cardinal direction system. Instead of using the relative direction "left" or "right" to describe the location of objects in relation to you, you'd have to use their compass-direction like "The tree that is westwards of me" instead of "the tree on my west". 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Pirah%C3%...
>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.
I saw a product that claims to train this skill. An anklet that vibrates periodically in the direction of north. No idea if it works.
The problem is that it doesn't really train it - in a way it's the opposite. I've heard about someone using a belt which vibrated like that. After using it for a while they felt completely lost without it and lost all feeling of direction. You actually need to let your brain do this for you, external input stops that. Though of course it would be nice with something like that, in general, if you could actually rely 100% on it.. which you can't, with GPS (in cities the direction may suddenly switch, for example, due to buildings playing havoc with the signal)
The strong version is disproven in the original paper: they mention concepts that cannot be expressed in English and then proceed to explain them. In English.
English grammar also has features for expressing uncertainty, unreality, hypothetical, wishes, demands with uncertain outcomes etc. by use of the subjunctive mood.
"If I were a bird, I would be able to fly." (were, not was) "God bless you." (bless, not blesses) "The teacher demands that students be on time." (be, not are)
Though many native speakers, even very intelligent ones, fail to properly use subjective mood at a high rate. Or otherwise do not recognize it. As some of the other comments note, there are some interesting differences around what a languages grammar will strictly enforce, where as in English, proper use of the subjunctive mood is less strict. Obviously, this is also far less expressiveness in English around this in grammar than there is in other languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood
>by tweaking the formality of our register).
what does register mean in this context? the tone of voice or something similar?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
Formal: "I would like to express my deepest gratitude for your invaluable assistance in this matter."
Neutral: "Thank you so much for your help with this."
Slang: "Thanks bro"
This reminds me of a sketch by one of my favorite comedians, which roughly translates to this:
"May i thank you for this nice cup of coffee?" "Go ahead" "I want to thank you for this nice cup of coffee." "Go ahead" "Thank you for this nice cup of coffee." "No thanks necessary" "But i explicitly wanted to give you my thanks!" "Sorry about that." "Well thanks for nothing!" "You're welcome"
thanks but no thanks.
Ironic disdain: "I would like to express my deepest gratitude for your invaluable assistance in this matter."
Yep. Or the phone customer support version, “I would like to express my deepest gratitude for you permitting me to help you in this matter…”
"You've shown a complete lack of poor judgment. I have no confidence in your ability to screw things up. You are incompetent as a failure. You are at the very rock bottom of your future potential."
I see what you didn't do there.
Levels of formality exist in most (if not all) natural languages, but the difference between what you've described above and a proper grammatical system is that the grammatical system is standardized, accurate and absolute. There are clear rules and clear formality levels involved.
Think about tense for instance. In English you have 3 basic grammatical tenses that can be combined with an aspect (perfect aspect, continuous aspect or both).
Mandarin Chinese has various aspect markers (like 了 le, 过 guo, 着 zhe or 在 zai), but does not have a grammatical marker for tense. That doesn't mean you cannot say that something will happen in the past or future: you just indicate the time with an adverb such as "tommorow", "yesterday" or "in the future".
The reason linguists say that Mandarin has no grammatical tense while English has grammatical tense is that the English tense is highly systematic. There are only 3 basic tenses (Past, Present and Future) and they are always marked the same way. On the other hand, Mandarin is flexible. You can mark the tense by using any temporal adverb you want, or even leave it out completely and let the speaker learn about it from the context. In English you don't get that level of flexibility: you HAVE to mark the tense, and you have only three ways of marking it (12 when you combine these ways with all the possible aspect combinations).
The same idea goes for thing like formality levels, honorifics or evidentiality.
English does have language registers, but there are many ways to express formality, and it's rarely clearly which of these ways is more formal. For instance, you can say:
"I would like to express my deepest gratitude for your invaluable assistance in this matter."
"I am sincerely grateful for the valuable time and effort you have so kindly dedicated to helping me."
"I am eternally in your debt for your gracious help in resolving the matter at hand."
Which one of them is more formal? I don't really know, and wouldn't want to spend a single moment debating about that.
However, in Korean it's pretty obvious that 합니다 (hamnida) is quite formal, but 하옵나이다 (haomnaida) is something so formal you'd usually only hear in historical dramas.
Japanese has less distinctions, but everybody can tell the difference between polite "desu", the polite formal "de gozaimasu", the formal (but not polite) "de aru", the informal and familiar "da" and then dated polite "de gozaru" (which you'd mostly hear in Samurai movies or other period dramas).
The situation in which you'd use each levels are also well-defined than in English. In particular, the familiar version is not neutral. You don't just use the Japanese "da" with people you don't know very well. It's not slang at all, but it's still quite rude to use it with strangers or your superiors.
And English has nothing quite like the distinction between "de aru", "de gozaimasu" and "desu". In most cases where you want to be polite (not formal) you would use "desu". "de gozaimasu" is used in certain settings that require extra formality (e.g. when talking to customers or in public announcements). "de aru" is something you would usually not use when addressing to people directly, since it is too plain (i.e. it would be quite rude). Instead, you find it in encyclopedias, reference books and documentaries.
Got it, thanks.
Thanks bro
;)
> 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.
Spanish culture encourages humility/modesty through idioms, like "tu humilde servidor" (your humble servant), "aquí, humildemente" (here, humbly), etc., but these are frequently used as humblebrags. I wonder if that happens in Tibetan culture too.
In the older Indo-European languages, like Ancient Greek or Latin, evidentiality was also important and it was expressed using different verbal moods, like the so-called indicative, subjunctive and optative.
Many modern European languages have been simplified from this point of view, but some still have remnants of the older uses of the verbal moods, like the use of some kind of subjunctive for anything that is not known with certainty, e.g. from direct experience.
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.
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.
> […] In official speech one almost never says singular "you" […]
With a notable exception being addressing the sovereign (king/queen/tsar/etc) where the singular «you», «thou» and similar were used, in all languages. The sovereign was seen as a direct peer, the ultimate protector of the people and the last instance of appeal, and the connection was also perceived as deeply intimate.
The practice fell out of favour in England (I'm not sure when exactly but probably with the transition to the constitutional monarchy), although it lived on elsewhere in mainland Europe until the demise of all major monarchies.
That probably stems from making people believe that sovereign is a semi-god, God's appointee. In religion, God was always addressed intimately, same when God addressed someone.
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 said it better than I can is this video:
Learning Languages Ruined My Life
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 Indians practice "Unity in Diversity" via their shared culture. For example, i grew up learning 4 languages viz; Tamil (mother tongue and 1st language), Bengali (since i grew up in West Bengal), English (medium of instruction and 2nd language) and Hindi (3rd language in school). It has given me a certain breadth of mind to appreciate our differences and yet have a shared common identity. A lot of Indians have similar multiple language upbringing and hence it is one of the reasons we can adapt and be successful anywhere in the World.
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.
That is not quite true.
It so happened that much of what has survived under the rubric "Hinduism" (itself an umbrella term for a whole gamut of philosophies, religious beliefs, rituals etc. and everything in between) has been through Sanskrit texts. It does not mean that all the concepts/ideas originated in that language domain. This is why you have the many schools of Hindu Philosophy categorized as orthodox (six recognized) vs. unorthodox (three recognized) and there are still more schools (notably many Tantric philosophies) not recognized under either of the above categories. Given the bewildering diversity of languages in the Indian Subcontinent it is almost certain that Sanskrit texts recast/reformulated philosophies/concepts/ideas from other languages (eg. Tamil and Sanskrit).
The situation is analogous to what happened after the Scientific Revolution where knowledge from German/French/Other European languages got disseminated via the English language through colonialism to the wider world.
Its possible, but still points towards, as I said, an overall hierarchy rather than a given multiplicity.
There is no intrinsic "overall hierarchy" but merely a "a posteriori" appearance of one.
There is no thing in itself here either to which one might ascribe a particular quality. There is a history of violence expressed through the language itself; I am doing my analysis immanently. When I say hierarchy I don't mean hierarchy outside the text.
Not sure what you are trying to say here. My point was that the fact that most Hindu Philosophy today is studied via the Sanskrit language does not mean all the philosophies/concepts/ideas originated in that medium and by extension in the culture that gave birth to it. It is from an amalgamation of various cultures and their languages from the Indian Subcontinent which has been expressed through Sanskrit texts. One can see this in the evolution of the language itself from Vedic to Classical Sanskrit and influences from Prakrit and Dravidian languages.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit for details.
Also see Classical Languages of India here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India
This is all given, however, through Sanskrit, so you are proving to me that the language itself shows the hierarchal dominance that the culture imposed, and that hierarchal dominance shows itself in the philosophy.
No it does not and that is your erroneous understanding. The proof is self-evident because none of the myriads of other languages in the Indian Subcontinent have been supplanted by Sanskrit. In fact there is a theory that Sanskrit was never a spoken language for common folk but merely a written one due to its precision. Also there exists multiple scripts to express Sanskrit in other Indian languages eg. "Grantha" script for Sanskrit->Tamil. All South Indian Classical Languages use their own scripts to write Sanskrit.
The linguistic complexity amongst the various states in India is very unique and hence simplistic notions of language dominance do not apply to India as a whole but varies from state to state.
The linguistic complexity does not exist in the philosophy. You are taking the modern state of India and imposing it on a language which neither originated in the country of “India” nor even had a direct relation to its contemporary history. The Brahmanical laws were absolute—the elite learned Sanskrit, developed the philosophy and literary culture, and justified their own rule through it. That entirely predates the colonial rule which formed the very “diversity” you see today. There was no recognition of any authority outside that produced through the text.
You have missed a lot of what i said/implied. First i used the phrase "Indian Subcontinent" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_subcontinent) which geographically includes much more than the current nation state of India. Second, the linguistic diversity in the Indian Subcontinent is thousands of years old, well predating the arrival of Muslims/British into India. In fact, the modern Indian state lines were drawn based on linguistic identity which has always existed. So i am not arguing from the modern Indian state pov but quite the opposite.
Your statement that Sanskrit did not originate in the Indian Subcontinent is controversial and is not settled. But regardless, there were groups who had Sanskrit as their lingua-franca and who specialized in orally transmitting and then writing down their own (and borrowed from other cultures) philosophies and worldviews. The other linguistic groups in India did not do it to the same degree and hence you have the current situation where it appears that all knowledge only came through Sanskrit one-way. This is the fallacy that i am pointing out. Note that this is quite apart from what the content of the Sanskrit texts themselves may/may not convey; that is a different matter and has to be looked at through a different lens.
yes. so there should be, for human languages, some variation of that Alan Perlis quote, that goes something like: a (programming) language that doesn't change the way you think, isn't worth learning. if not, someone should make one up.
I speak three languages on top of my own native language and never felt that way at all. In my opinion it's just a weird idea coming from people who like to overthink things.
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.
How is that different?
By the feeling, it's the same. But it's an important distinction. You cannot change "the people", but you can change yourself. And that is very different. In the first, you are subservient of something much larger than you, and the second is a world of possibilities. Turning your thinking around enables you to have your best possible experience of your own life - or so they say.
> In the first, you are subservient of something much larger than you, and the second is a world of possibilities.
The latter is a much more grim perspective. What it means is that, if you've been putting all your effort, all your effort is still not enough, and you objectively suck and you will never stop being useless trash. But if you consider people as an unpredictable, unstoppable force, then it's much easier to accept, and just make your way around it. Like weather. It really sucks when I want to go out but then exactly at this moment a huge storm breaks out, but there's nothing I can do about it, so I'd better adjust my life to the fact that weather sometimes sucks and that's it. While I could've planned for bad weather, at its core the fact that weather sometimes sucks is not my fault and there's nothing I can do about it.
Exactly like weather. Grimness has almost nothing to do with the subject here. What I want to communicate is specifically not about how the world is, but about what we do with our experience in it. And how we react to that experience, inside and outside. What I would like to put forward is that we cannot substantially change the world, or the people, but we can change ourselves, and with that, how we experience the world - and ourselves within it.
I would like to add that I'm not on a high horse here. I too suck at this. But I do think that it is a worthy effort, and something that is a Good Thing for the self, and to whom and whatever comes into contact with that person too.
If you lived in a place with huge storms all the time, to live joyously would mean to affirm that life. But people are not terrible.
>Phoenix Ho
Spelled Hou, per the video.
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 English. When English speakers part ways late at night, they say "good night" - not just that it was pleasant to meet, but wishing the remainder of the night be good (for everyone), whatever they choose to do. How thoughtful! Even the simple "good bye" is easily decipherable as "(may) god be with you," blessing the other with the almighty god.
> When speaking Tibetan, instead of saying, “I have a phone,” we would say something closer to “a phone abides by me.” My concept of the things I “own” has changed from “this is mine” to “this happens to be near me, and I happen to be able to use it,” with no inherent possession. This can be a wonderful and helpful tool to work with attachment.
Well, I can also relate because Korean also doesn't like the verb "have," so instead of "I have a phone," we'll say something like "(speaking of) me, a phone exists." But woe to the poor soul who thinks the expression precludes inherent possession - you'll quickly and violently discover the errors of your ways if you try to take a phone from a random Korean speaker, or - I strongly suspect - a random Tibetan speaker.
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!
Irish and Russian also have "there's a phone near me (by me)" instead of "I have a phone"
> 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.
If 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.
and when you can't remember the word for something, but you are thinking of the thing, what language is that?
Mentalese
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.
(Just to add - I also don't use an inner voice when I read, unless I decide to. And when I do, reading slows down to a crawl, obviously. So in general I don't)
It's not solely about the inner voice. Abstract concepts, symbol manipulation, mathematical logic and reasoning are for the most part "linguistic" constructs.
Anecdotally, when I say I am thinking in English or Spanish, I’m not usually thinking in words, more in a cultural context and in concepts that are not symbolically articulated. Some of those concepts only exist (to me) in one cultural context or another and not in both. Basically wherever I learned something is where it “lives” in my mind. I can know “of” it in another context, but to think about it directly, in the first person, I need to “enter” the context in which it was acquired.
That’s why I can’t even -think- about math in Spanish, it just doesn’t work for me. I never learned mathematical concepts inside of that thought context.
And when I think of some people inside of English context, I can’t remember what it feels like to talk to them.
When I am tired I sometimes slip between contexts without knowing and cannot easily discern what language I am speaking or listening to.
I find it absolutely fascinating. It seems like there might be some insight to be had studying the phenomenon in people that experience it.
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 a ton of languages you have to care about nouns being masculine / feminine (la ciudad, ein Stadt, etc). In e.g. Slavic languages you have to also care about nouns being animate / inanimate.
Regarding the Slavic languages, while e.g. Ukrainian has the typical English-like possessive construction, e.g. "I have a car", Russian uses something like "by me there is a car". It also has the perfect tense designation as a part of the verb, in all forms and tenses. With that, some verbs lack some tenses! Formally these tenses could possibly be formed, but are never used and are considered unacceptable. Notably, you can say "we will win", but cannot say "I will win" using the same verb.
Opposed to that, Japanese is highly regular, it has like 2.5 irregular verbs in the entire language. Its verb system is hugely flexible and expressive, but it lacks a future tense; you have to infer it from the context. Nouns also lack a regular plural form; you can mark a noun as plural in a pinch, but usually you have to infer it from the context, and omit when speaking. Most sentences are built around topic markers: instead of "I have a car" you say "Regarding me, a car exists". Adjectives are actually lightweight verbs, and can have a past tense. The system of politeness / honorifics permeates the language: not only "younger sister" and "elder sister" are different words, but "your wife" and "my wife" are completely different words, same for "my home" and "your home". To say nothing about the writing system that uses ideographic characters for halves of many words. Imagine using emojis for writing, with attached strings of letters for things like -ed, -s, -ing, etc.
Knowing stuff like this is mildly entertaining. What changes your perception is an honest attempt to use such a language, translating texts, and especially for daily communication. You start noticing untranslatable stuff, things that cannot be expressed in a different language, except with a lengthy and awkward explanation. Congrats, now you have a new mental tool.
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.
Comment was deleted :(
Comment was deleted :(
Maybe English is not a mind-opening language :(
Look at how English treats time as money. You save, invest, spend, waste it. There are plenty of these things out there, but they're subtle.
Yes, instead it is an opening-minded language :), as in, it creates work and business openings, being the de facto international language of business.
Depends where you are coming from.
Anthony Burgess wrote that learning Malay, where semantics trumped syntax, made a considerable difference to his understanding of language.
The whole sci-fi short story and movie Arrival is based on this concept
Could it be that Tibetan is invented to translate Buddhism has something to do with it I wonder.
My understanding is that Chomsky formally proved that this is impossible, ie all languages are exactly equal.
Not sure about mathematically rigorous "proof", but a powerful theory of grammar at least. His claim is "true" in the sense of computation, ie the lowest level Chomsky grammar[1] is just like a Turing machine and consequently can generate anything.
But the analogy with computing languages also supplies a practical insight that isnt captured by the academic theory, ie that some concepts are easier to express in one language than another. If I'm inverting a matrix, I'd reach for Python over C for example.
I think Chomsky's theories became popular in anglophone linguistic circles (and later in the rest of the world) because their math-like structure and close applicability to computer science. They've proven to be useful in some cases, but there has been no proof of a universal grammar. The fact that you can create a formal system to represent an idea, is not a proof by any stretch of that definition.
This is why some people would even go as far as classifying Chomsky's theories as pseudo-science (see one of the replies to GP). I wouldn't go as far, but considering the almost toxic disdain Chomsky himself has to every linguist who is not interested in researching his supposed Universal Grammar (he has famously compared structural and functional linguistics to "butterfly collectors"), we should view this theory with more criticism.
Well, the real issue with Chomsky is that he came into vogue during the “linguistic” turn, except he misunderstood the anglo philosophers, thinking their theories had a natural basis, and misunderstood the french, thinking that their studies of writing and discourse made them philosophers of language. But the Kantian project still stands, one must have an architectonic, before one can make a scientific approach. But Kant was always sure to set his critical project within its dialectic, and placed the basis of cognition below language and discourse. That is what the French were able to capture, and its why contemporary philosophy today is so suffuse with discourses on aesthetics (though I’m being a bit broad with what I refer to as “Philosophy,” perhaps it’d be better to say “philosophical work”).
No, Chomsky did not "prove" anything.
His Theory of "Universal Grammar" is more of a pseudo-science. See the "criticism" section here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
Also see this article from Scientific American; Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-c...
What is logic here against the subjective internal experience you're responding to. Do I have to hold an axiom true to believe the person describing their internal experience is specifically as Chomsky proved in the language of logic?
I'm actually glad you posted this because it reminded me of a quote from Wittgenstein's page on Wikipedia [1]
> According to Wittgenstein, philosophical problems arise when language is forced from its proper home into a metaphysical environment, where all the familiar and necessary landmarks and contextual clues are removed. He describes this metaphysical environment as like being on frictionless ice: where the conditions are apparently perfect for a philosophically and logically perfect language, all philosophical problems can be solved without the muddying effects of everyday contexts; but where, precisely because of the lack of friction, language can in fact do no work at all.[259] Wittgenstein argues that philosophers must leave the frictionless ice and return to the "rough ground" of ordinary language in use. Much of the Investigations consists of examples of how the first false steps can be avoided, so that philosophical problems are dissolved, rather than solved: "The clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear."
Wittgenstein also had serious changes of opinions.
Agreed. It's not an appeal to authority it's a paragraph I enjoyed reading and remembered in this context
Ah yes, this is famously why we only have one programming language.
Maybe not, but most of them are expecting users to have English in mind to some degree, plus the top ten most used are definitely all procedural paradigm plus some encapsulation such as OOP, as opposed to something like prolog.
The point I was snidely trying to make is that certain languages make certain representations and tasks easier than others. Ease, convenience, and representation length are probably more useful metrics than "possible" in the context of this discussion.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code