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> 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 experienc

> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality [2] https://wals.info/chapter/77 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.

BobaFloutist 2y ago
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).
- fuzztester 2y ago
  >by tweaking the formality of our register). what does register mean in this context? the tone of voice or something similar?
  - sureIy 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics) 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"
    - gyomu 2y ago
      Ironic disdain: "I would like to express my deepest gratitude for your invaluable assistance in this matter."
      - ted_bunny 2y ago
        "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."
        fuzztester 2y ago
        I see what you didn't do there.
      - xtiansimon 2y ago
        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…”
    - unscaled 2y ago
      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.
deepsun 2y ago
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".
- bloak 2y ago
  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.
  - Tor3 2y ago
    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.
- inkyoto 2y ago
  > […] 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.
  - 2y ago
adrian_b 2y ago
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.
ASalazarMX 2y ago
> 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.

BobaFloutist 2y ago

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).

fuzztester 2y ago
>by tweaking the formality of our register). what does register mean in this context? the tone of voice or something similar?
- sureIy 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics) 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"
  - gyomu 2y ago
    Ironic disdain: "I would like to express my deepest gratitude for your invaluable assistance in this matter."
    - ted_bunny 2y ago
      "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."
      - fuzztester 2y ago
        I see what you didn't do there.
    - xtiansimon 2y ago
      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…”
  - unscaled 2y ago
    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.

deepsun 2y ago

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".

bloak 2y ago
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.
- Tor3 2y ago
  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.
inkyoto 2y ago
> […] 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.
- 2y ago

adrian_b 2y ago

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.

ASalazarMX 2y ago

> 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.