Free Languages In the World by Julie Tetel Andresen, Phillip M. Carter

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