> 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.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality</a><p>[2] <a href="https://wals.info/chapter/77" rel="nofollow">https://wals.info/chapter/77</a> - 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.