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LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

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Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

#31

Post by washadjeffmad »

klausa wrote: post #7
Apocryphon wrote: post #2

Chinese kinship labels for the win https://blog.tutorabcchinese.com/chinese-learning-tips/famil...

AIUI Korean and Farsi (among many others, I'm sure!) also have lots of very specific words for familial relationships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_and_cross_cousins

Kinship systems are neat.

Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

#32

Post by wizofaus »

lynguist wrote: post #6
lainga wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related question (not really!) - two dads or moms - who should be called what?

Not an issue: You already have two grandfathers and two grandmothers, how do you call them?

I'd imagine kids that happen to grow up in households with two granddads or two grandmas would find solutions - I remember we called the latter two "grey grandma" and "white grandma" on the basis of their hair colour, though I'm not sure how often we used those names to their faces. And of course plenty of adults call their parents and step-parents or parents in law of the same sex the same thing. I'm curious if there are any languages that don't have separate words for "mum" and "dad" though. Tried googling but all the results were about how different languages use similar words for each term individually.

Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

#33

Post by jjtheblunt »

lynguist wrote: post #6
lainga wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related question (not really!) - two dads or moms - who should be called what?

Not an issue: You already have two grandfathers and two grandmothers, how do you call them?

Not if your parents are siblings

Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

#34

Post by mulmen »

klausa wrote: post #23
mulmen wrote: post #8

Why though? Where does this actually get used? This seems to represent two different relationships. The mother’s sibling could be a brother. For the father a sister is specified. What about the father’s brother’s younger daughter? The description says younger daughter in both cases but the name doesn’t specify. So what’s the class for the older daughter of the mother’s sibling or the father’s sister? And if age is re…

There are different words in different languages for those specific relationships; and some languages lack a "generic" words like "cousin" that you could use in English without knowing the relationship details. I'm not a speaker, but someone once explained to me that for example in Farsi, you can't just refer to someone's "cousin", without knowing the person's gender _and_ the two related parents genders.

Ok so this is for i18n and in English would just be “cousin”? Can we assume there actually is a language somewhere that makes this particular distinction and has a word for it?

Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

#36

Post by prosody »

Of possible interest to HNers, kinship terminology of different cultures is a subject that has a very elegant taxonomy. It was a major line of inquiry in early modern sociology, which tried to link other attributes of how societies were structured to how they named relations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship_terminology

Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

#37

Post by lainga »

wizofaus wrote: post #32
lynguist wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an issue: You already have two grandfathers and two grandmothers, how do you call them?

I'd imagine kids that happen to grow up in households with two granddads or two grandmas would find solutions - I remember we called the latter two "grey grandma" and "white grandma" on the basis of their hair colour, though I'm not sure how often we used those names to their faces. And of course plenty of adults call their parents and step-parents or parents in law of the same sex the same thing. I'm curious if ther…

Wait, that would work (for my specific use case). "White dad" and "brown dad". But - what would the PTA say...

Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

#39

Post by lainga »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #18
lainga wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow, I don't want my kids calling me "grandpa"...

lynguist is suggesting that you and your partner both be called with the same word

OH, I thought meant take the grandparent names and strip some common grandparent root from them or something complicated and etymological

Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

#40

Post by wizofaus »

satya71 wrote: post #26

English so inefficient when expressing human relationships.

And very imprecise. Virtually nobody gets it right when trying to describe a relationship with an nth cousin m times removed. And recently I tried to work out a fairly basic relationship between myself and my son's step-sisters - they're not biologically related to me at all, or even by (current) marriage, but it seemed like there should be a term for it.
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