Languages In the World (7 page)

Language loops into the so-called real world. Humans are good observers, and one of the reasons to preserve endangered languages is that they represent what we might call
the first science
, and their speakers possess vast stores of knowledge, built up over time, about the dynamics of the ecosystems they inhabit along with the local plants and animals with which they share that ecosystem. The Yupik, who live in the Arctic, are experts on ice, snow, and wind conditions there. The Tuvan in western Mongolia know everything there is to know about yaks, and their language and culture treasure that information. Aboriginal Australians understand their geography like no one else. Because languages are always embodied in individuals who are embedded in places, languages and landscapes are connected.

Speakers are also always embedded in cultural contexts. Different languages might include grammatical information about social status. For instance, both Japanese and Korean have an array of suffixes, known as honorifics, that one puts on verbs depending on with whom one is speaking. The social complexities might also involve word choice and a requirement to end a sentence with a particular particle, as a show of respect. Japanese has three levels of speech: casual, polite, and honorific/humble.
These levels will require different vocabulary items and verbal endings. The honorific/ humble category shows two ways to show respect to another person by elevating that person and/or humbling yourself.

Languages also differ in the ways they express common behavioral routines, both single, customary events and multifaceted, complex events. These expressions depend on the cultural conventions. Nick Enfield's (2002)
Ethnosyntax
provides examples. When it comes to representing a single, ordinary event such as
going to the bathroom
, English speakers cover the whole event with the general verb
to go
. Speakers of Lao, which is spoken in Laos, use a construction for the same event, which is equivalent to
enter room-water
(Enfield 2002:230). Thus, in Lao, the whole event is identified by a more punctual activity. How complex events are described also depends on the customariness of two or more activities occurring together in a particular culture. In Hmong, which is also spoken in Laos as well as neighboring countries, the events of
dancing (while) playing the pipes
as opposed to
dancing (while) listening to a song
will be perceived and, then, spoken of differently. In the first case, dancing and playing the pipes are a customary unitary event in the culture and is therefore considered so syntactically; the idea is expressed by the equivalent of the English
he dances blows bamboo pipes
. Dancing and listening to a song, however, are not considered unitary, and so mention of the two activities together requires a connective, roughly the equivalent of
he dances
and
listens to music
(Enfield 2002:241). Without the
and
, this latter sentence is ungrammatical. As Enfield puts it in the opening sentence to his book, “Grammar is thick with cultural meaning.”

The thickness of this
ethnosyntax
is, indeed, rich. Even the humble English word
dozen
is infused with it. This word was borrowed from French
douzaine
meaning ‘a group of 12' (
douze
= 12) and is first found in the written record of English during the fourteenth century.
²
French uses the -
aine
suffix productively:
dizaine
‘group of 10',
quinzaine
‘group of 15',
vingtaine
‘group of 20', and so forth. English has no similar productive number-grouping suffix of its own; and when English speakers had the chance, they did not borrow the French suffix for producing number-groups, but borrowed only the lone exemplar
dozen
.
³
This word now appears in common expressions. When describing a situation when two items are equivalent and the choice does not matter, one calls it
six of one, a half-dozen of the other
. It is also used either hyperbolically or for a moderately large number of things, for example,
The chemist spent dozens of years working on his formula
and
There are dozens of books piled up on the table
. When an item is relatively plentiful, it is described as being
a dime a dozen
.

The point is that this word does not have currency only in linguistic expressions, because the specific quantity 12 has effects in the real world of English speakers. Over the centuries, the word
dozen
has established a stable cultural relationship with egg packaging, the listed prices of certain bakery goods like bagels and donuts, the preferred number of roses in a bouquet, and the number of bottles in a traditional case of wine. The word is looped into the material lives of English-speaking bakers, florists, wine merchants, and people who make certain kinds of packaging. It plays a part in their behavior in terms of, among other things, pricing policies and the ways they arrange their products. It affects the ordering practices of their customers.

The word
douzaine
was borrowed into Romanian, however only relatively recently, and it is not commonly used, although there is a phrase
de duzină
meaning ‘mediocre.' It is found in the phrase
un om de duzină
, which means basically ‘a worthless person.' Otherwise, the word is not found in any sayings, nor is it ever used as a number-group for things. It furthermore has no cultural relationship with the prices of bakery goods or with eggs, which in Romania come in cartons of either four or 10. As for the number of flowers one offers to a girlfriend or as a hostess gift, the number must always be odd, the reason being that in Romania even-numbered bouquets are only for the dead.
⁴
The point here is that the ‘same' words
dozen/duzină
are not at all equivalent in different cultural contexts.

Speaking of numbers, the Hispanic custom of the
quinceañera
 – the birthday celebrated when a girl turns 15, involving a mass, a special dress, and a party – is quite a bit more culturally salient in the communities where it is practiced than is the somewhat parallel North American notion of
sweet 16
, which finds cultural currency mostly in songs or allusive use, such as in the movie title
Sixteen Candles
, and has no religious connection, such as including a church service. It could have been that 15 was chosen as the watershed year for North American girls, which might have produced the phrase
fine 15
or
fair 15
, but it wasn't. In any case, the key thing for English speakers is for the phrase to alliterate. The strong preference for alliteration in English can be traced back to poetic practices in Old English and is found in clichés and coupled words:
busy as a bee
,
cool as a cucumber
,
hell in a handbasket
,
right as rain
,
wild and wooly
,
wrack and ruin
. It even seems to be at work in the choice speakers make to use the shortened form of
because
: “I put my coat on, ‘cuz it's cold.” The phrase also sounds better that way, and speakers do like what they say to sound right. The idea here is that different cultures weave similar practices – here, a girl's coming of age – differently into cultural practices, just as linguistic differences may shape certain cultural notions.

Cultural practices emerge and develop in particular settings, just as linguistic structures both support and are supported by cultural practices. In Australia, children in certain Aboriginal cultures play dead reckoning games they are not expected to solve correctly until age eight or so. In the English-speaking world, children aged four and five play the circle game Hokey-Pokey, where “You put your right hand in. You put your right hand out…”. As the children successively put in their left hand, right leg, left leg, and so on – with all the ensuing confusions and giggling – they are learning right from left. And, as the song says: “That's what it's all about.” The respective interactions of dead reckoning and right/left distinctions with regard to cultural practices illustrate the ways that language, culture, and cognition complement and shape one another.

In this section, we have been speaking of contexts, specifically cultural contexts in microcorners of the English-speaking world versus Romania as well as Latin America versus North America. The study of how contexts influence the interpretations of meaning is called
pragmatics
. In a specific cultural context, one can study how variables such as time, place, social relationships, and a speaker's assumptions about the hearer's beliefs come into play. The moment one leaves the dynamics of one cultural context and moves to another is the moment one discovers how different can be words,
phrases, syntactic possibilities, social relationships, and even the kinds of assumptions speakers make in relationship to cultural practices. Ethnosyntax might therefore also be called
cross-cultural pragmatics
or
comparative pragmatics
.

Language loops in and around itself. The final
-s
in the third person singular present-tense English verbs, for example,
she eat
s
, does not refer to the extralinguistic world and can only be understood on its own terms. Quite a bit of the linguistic structure discussed in Chapter 1 forms the ways language loops around itself. This means that not all of language coincides with all of the culture in and through which it is looped, nor even do grammatical features necessarily align with any objective reality. To live in and through a particular language is to take the perspectives one's predecessors have worked out in their recurrent interactions.

The speakers of some languages, like English, split their perspectives on the way they conceive of all objects in the universe and make a distinction between nouns they can count and nouns they conceive of in terms of mass. Count nouns are concrete things like
books
and
chairs
, and abstract things like
jobs
and
governments
that get pluralized when there is more than one. Mass nouns are concrete things such as
water
,
snow
, and
salt
or abstract things such as
damage
and
hope
. English speakers can refer to five books and three chairs, and talk about holding down two jobs or the way one government follows another. When it comes to
water
,
snow
, and
salt
, however, English speakers do not refer to two waters (unless they are waiting tables and using short hand for how many glasses of water they need to get to their customers) or one snow (unless they are referring to snow collectively, as in ‘the first snow of the season') or one damage. Mass nouns require a way to be talked about, a way to be construed: a drop of water, a flake of snow, a grain of salt, a pat of butter, a dollop of cream, and so forth. When you're estimating relative sizes of count nouns, and the question arises: How many books are there? The answer could be either: very many or very few. When you're estimating relative sizes of mass nouns, the question becomes: How much hope is there? And the answer is now either: very much or very little.

Speakers of other languages make no distinction between count nouns and mass nouns, and view all objects in the universe as mass nouns. In Vietnamese, when a noun is particularized by being counted or used with a demonstrative, such as
this
and
that
, a numeral classifier (CL) is grammatically necessary. Examples include:

• một cái áo
  
• ‘one' (CL) ‘shirt'
  
• ‘one shirt'
  
• hai quyển sách
  
• ‘two' (CL) ‘book'
  
• ‘two books.'
  

Note that the nouns
shirt
and
book
require no plural morpheme, and be aware that without the numeral classifier, it is difficult for a Vietnamese person to understand what you are talking about. When learning a language with numeral classifiers, Chinese for instance, your teacher may tell you that if you don't know the proper classifier or have forgotten it, it is better to insert the most common classifier
gè
into whatever you are counting than nothing at all in order to be understood. In addition to Vietnamese and Chinese, other numeral classifier languages include, among others, Japanese, Korean, and Malay. These languages tend to have between 20 and 200 classifiers, and they almost always involve the size and/or shapes of the noun particularized.

Here, we note that English has an incipient classifier system, with
piece of
as the default classifier that particularizes many mass nouns such as
luggage
,
gum
,
gossip
,
news
,
furniture
, and
pie
.
⁵
An example of an obligatory classifier in English exists for the restricted set of mass nouns
golf
,
applause
,
violence
,
government measures
(e.g.,
taxes
,
funding cuts
, etc.), and
drinks
(in the sense of group participation). When particularized by a number, the indefinite article
a
, or the adjective
another
, these nouns require the classifier
round of
to be used. In other words no one says
^*
play two golfs
or
^*
play another golf.
Games in general in English are viewed as mass nouns. We either play a game of tennis or play tennis but we do not
^*
play a tennis. In other European languages, Romanian for instance, it is possible to say, colloquially,
joc un tenis
‘I am playing a [game of] tennis.'

The point is that language is perspective-taking. This perspective-taking varies from language to language and therefore gets structured differently from language to language. Linguistic structure is language looping around itself and then pulling the speaker's attention toward one perspective or another.