> Spanish even distinguishes cuñado (brother-in-law by blood relation to your spouse) from concuñado, your spouse’s sibling’s husband—something like “co-brother-in-law”.
I've thought it confusing that English doesn't have separate terms for my brother's wife and my wife's sister (both of which are simply "sister-in-law"). Why are we content to describe these people as people of the same generation who are not blood relatives? This doesn't even get into the Spanish example above, which refers to two degrees of marriage separation.
In Punjabi (my mother language), its same as Spanish (not exact words).
Different words for brother's siblings & wife's siblings. Bhra. Bhen. Bhabhi. Saali.
Different words for elder than my dad uncle v/s younger than my dad (& their wives, so total 4 words). Chacha. Chachi. Taaya. Taayi.
Different word for my brother's kids v/s sister's kids (& gender, so total 4 words). Bhateeja. Bhateeji. Bhaanja. Bhaanji.
Different word for my father in law v/s his brother (& their wives, again set of 4 words). Sahura. Sass. Taaya. Taayi.
A set of 4 words for my father's parents v/s my mum's parents. Daada. Daadi. Naana. Naani.
Almost any of the above' friends (same social circle) gets the same word. So same word for my father's brother and brother's friend.
These all might share a but of pronunciation here and there; otherwise all of them are totally independent (one word), & not derived from each other (like something-in-law).
Yeah, relations can be explained by combining words in most Hindustani languages
Maamu ka beta for example.
This phrase is somewhat equally translated in all local languages so people don't have to say "my maternal uncles son" which does the same thing but is much easier to explain and convey
What use would it have? The other languages mentioned (Chinese, Spanish, Japanese - I can't speak about Hebrew or Arabic) all come from very hierarchical societies that are still very hierarchical today whereas English has been seemingly on a mission to remove all such things for centuries, so thou was dropped for you by around 500 years ago and there's been a movement against honorifics like Miss or even the precision between the last few gendered words like actress.
Thus I'm not sure why this kind of detail would arise. in-law to a native basically indicates any of "they're not (really) my family", "they're not my problem" or "they poke their nose into my business when they shouldn't", or "I'm not going to share their name with you but I need some way to indicate a relationship". If the precision is needed it can be added later, like everything else in such a generalist (low context) language.
Feel free to inform me of the differences between English and Spanish that could have this arise instead of the hierarchical nature of living in a Catholic society that was also under military dictatorship for a long period. Thanks.
> Why are we content to describe these people as people of the same generation who are not blood relatives?
Probably because the inhabitants of Britain decided at a certain point do ditch their Roman heritage. Romanian, a Romance langauge, is very similar to Spanish, we have cumnat for cuñado, soacră for the Spanish suegra (mother-in-law) and cuscri for consuegros, which goes to show that the family ties expressed by Romanian and Spanish most certainly come from the common ancestor that was Latin, and not from the "surrounding" societal norms (so to speak) or something like that.
Maybe us (I'm Romanian myself) having a distinct word for cumnat might have slightly changed how we view that family tie over the centuries, but it was not the distinctiveness of that family tie per se that "created" that special term, because we inherited that word from the Romans.
On the other hand, I think it's weird that there's a term for it at all. For how often I need to refer to either concept, "brother's wife" and "wife's sister" are both easy enough to say.
But it doesn't surprise me that we refer to then as people of the same generation; it's not much different from "step-brother" in that regard.
I'm a Spanish speaker and find it interesting that Swedish has dedicated (compound) words to refer to a person's maternal grandfather/grandmother/uncle/aunt (morfar/mormor/morbror/moster) and paternal ones (farfar/farmor/farbror/faster). In Spanish, for aunt we just have tía, to say something like moster we would say something like tía del lado de mi mamá or tía materna.
Ok, I'm dying to ask this. Is it strange that `casado` (side note, I mentally translate it as: "shacked up (with)") takes estar (instead of ser, like your profession does? Though I figure back in the middle ages your profession really was permanent)
both are used, as this [1] points out, the "estar" vs "ser" depends on what aspect you want to highlight. "estoy casado" highlights the fact that you weren't before, and "soy casado" highlights the fact that you are now.
It's the same for many indian languages too. "Acchamma" stands for paternal grandmother in my mother tounge. "Acchan" stands for dad and "Amma" is mom so the combination of those two is dad's mother. Similarly "ammamma" is maternal grandmother
Also in Spanish the distinction between 'Amigo' and 'Compañero' or 'Compa' - 'Amigo' is what people think of as 'friend' in english but it's really more like a friendly acquaintance while 'compa' is much, much closer to how 'Friend' is used in English. Single-word distinctions in familiarity even stretches out to that level of interaction.
I think that's the whole language in a lot of ways, though, like you just have a larger dictionary in Spanish because you can modify or combine words in ways that avoid you having to say stuff like "my sister in law, like yeah my brother's wife". That's literally how many more syllables you have to say in English just to say what's said in one word in Spanish, the verbosity is just way higher. I think this leads English speakers to perceive Spanish as a 'fast' language (and some dialects certainly are) but I chalk it up to being able to say more with less words. This is also the case in every other language I've learned compared to English (Japanese, German - Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher anyone? ... and now Russian).
Spanish also lets you distinguish between carro nuevo and nuevo carro - being a brand new car vs a car that is new to you. Even there I had to throw in "brand" to make it clear the distinction.
It's the same in French, and I came to the conclusion that it must be for symmetry reasons: you are the brother in law of your sister in law (switch/replace genders as appropriate). I think it makes sense.
> Spanish even distinguishes cuñado (brother-in-law by blood relation to your spouse) from concuñado, your spouse’s sibling’s husband—something like “co-brother-in-law”.
I learnt something new today. So the English in-laws concept includes both one's spouse's sibling's, and sopuse's sibling's spouse?
IMO it can go either way. My wife's brother and his wife have been together since before I met my wife. I am equally close to both of them, and I would refer to her as my sister-in-law.
But I could see how some people might feel much closer to their spouse's sibling than to the spouse of that person (especially if the spouse came into the picture much later). But there's no elegant way to refer to these people, and it could be seen as offensive to demote them from "sister-in-law" to "brother-in-law's wife".
Taking things one step further, I don't know anyone who refers to their sibling-in-law's sibling as a brother-in-law/sister-in-law. But I suppose technically one could!
I think the problem is that if you had different words, it would stop being symmetric. You currently call your wife's brother the same term that he calls you. If there were different terms, you would refer to each other differently. You would no longer be able to say "we're brothers in law".
In Mandarin there are so many titles, and even family friends can get them.
I'm glad that in English we can just call someone by their first name (with a simple title if need be) and ignore all the awkwardness of not knowing someone's title when we want to address them for the first time.
To make matters worse, due to the influence of the other Sinitic languages (Wu, Yue, Min, etc.), Mandarin actually has regional variations of a lot of these words as well!
Note, however, that in some places, it is OK to combine the name + title for disambiguity, instead of relying solely on the attachment of an ordinal number.
e.g. for your father's sister, who is the 3rd child, you could say either:
- 三姑 ("father's sister, 3rd in birth order"), or
- 艷姑 ("father's sister, Yan"), if she has the character "艷" in her name.
In my country you typically refer to someone by their first name informally, or first and last formally. Newspaper articles often abbreviate the first name, e.g. J. Doe. The only time I see titles used is when someone is a medical doctor, or if you are referring to your teacher (Mr / Mrs).
On the other hand a peculiarity compared to English is the surname has different suffixes for men and women, and for married and unmarried women. Divorced women will often revert back to their pre-married surname, but keep the married suffix.
Funny, though I didn't grow up speaking Marathi (it was extremely frowned upon where I was born) I needed an extensive set of family (and food) words in order to speak with relatives. It's quite common to refer to someone by how you are related to them (mother's brother's wife: मामी, mami); the problem is in a conversation you have to know how you are related to the speaker so that when they say "father's sister" (आत्या, Ātyā) they are referring to the same person.
What makes this interesting is that (as somebody pointed out to me years ago) I carried this habit into my main language, English. Not that I say anything as specific as "mother's brother's wife" -- I just say "my aunt" but apparently I frequently refer to people by connection (your sister) rather than by their name.
Manderin has non-gendered pronouns referring to a person (something missing in English), and a wealth of words referring to family relations relative to the person speaking. It's rude for someone to refer to an older relation by name, and so it's always done by the relational words. There are special terms for extended relations on the father's side of the family. It is particularly rude to refer to a family member by the generic, non-gendered pronoun, because that indicates the speaker does not have any relation with that person at all.
These words encourages a more collectivist rather than an individual mindset with biases based on the person's seniority. That can be good and bad. For example, there's less room for identity politics in day-to-day speech, and in turn, you're reminded in detail of relations and roles. Korean has something similar. South Korea had to retrain their airline pilots to speak in English during flight operations because those very same relational words do not allow for flow of critical information and contributed towards crashes.
> Manderin has non-gendered pronouns referring to a person (something missing in English)
English actually has a complicated gender neutrality history. For instance, it used to be that only women had a specific pronoun while what we regard today as male pronouns used to be neutral [1]. We also have "they"/"them" which have been historically baked into the language for these purposes.
Yeah. I forgot that written Chinese has 他 as the generic and 她 as the gendered one specific for women. In Mandarin, 他 and 她 are both pronounced the same.
They/them is only plural. It works ok in writing but IMO it sounds really weird to use it in casual conversation. I used to agree with the APA style guide that you should just use them but lately I've been having second thoughts.
This isn't true though, they has been used for centuries as an indefinite singular pronoun, like "oh someone left their umbrella, they probably want that back let's see if there's a tag".
It is the case that using it as a definite singular is new, and we'll see if that lasts.
this is a common misconception, but it isn't true, and it hasn't been true since the days of Shakespeare, who used they/them as a singular. Jane Austen did the same thing. I don't know who misinformed you on this topic, but I am willing to bet it was not a writer of that caliber. I think we can safely consider Shakespeare and Austen to be experts in the English language.
I wouldn't consider them experts on the language, since English is not a prescriptive language. However, they do provide good historical references on use of words to avoid the ridiculous 'you can't use that word like that' arguments.
If we're going to be prescriptive about use of 'they' as a definite pronoun we may as well complain about how particular and peculiar swapped meanings in common vernacular.
Do you mean that there is no single body, like the French have, directing the usage of the language? I would consider "prescriptive / descriptive" to be properties of a dictionary, but not properties of the language itself. I'm not a subject matter expert so I'm not contradicting you, rather I'm asking.
> non-gendered pronouns referring to a person (something missing in English)
"they"? People pushing for "they/them" pronoun acceptance are always quick to point out "singular they" (even though the usage is quite contextual and limited).
> Manderin has non-gendered pronouns referring to a person
That's only when spoken, because 他 and 她 are homophones, no? Otherwise when written it is almost exactly the same as English in how pronouns are gendered with he/she/it.
I don’t claim that it leads to equality. That’s a problematic assertion.
I said that the relational words in Mandarin leads to (and enforces) a collectivist rather than than individualist mindset. There is less semantics about identity and more about relations. Identity is a reference to a self, whereas relational words refer to how a self relates to another self. The emphasis is on the relation — and the social expectations, responsibilities, and priveledges of that relation, and less on the identity of either the speaker or the person the speaker refers to.
So for example, I wouldn’t say “Bob”. I’d say “my da-ge” (big older brother). When I use the latter in conversations with other people, those people knows I have this relation I can lean on. When referring to younger siblings, I might not even use their names even if I could do so without being rude. I might say to someone else, “my xiao-de”, my little brother, making an implicit claim that this person is family, under my protection. Whether the kid is worthy of such protection, whether I personally want to or not, is secondary that there is a relation and there are expectations that goes with it.
I don’t know if I agree, that seems more tribalism than collectivism. In comparing Bob, Jane and smith or similar nondescript lao baixing names vs distinguishing family/non family plus exact hierarchical familiar relation, it doesn’t seem hierarchical exact relations is more communal. Opinions can differ.
Collectivist, as I am using it, is not the same as being communal, as in having no hierarchy. I am using “collectivist” to mean a deemphasis on the individual and an greater emphasis on the collective. How exactly that collective is structured is not a part of this assertion.
It could well be tribalism, and the way I mean “collectivist” is not exclusive to tribalism.
I’ve observed this as an outsider with my wife of Vietnamese background. Just one example — amazing to western eyes — is that our wedding invitation to her uncle, aunt and two cousins (i.e. one nuclear family) contained not one name. It was (if I translate) “aunt ten, husband-of-aunt ten, older brother two, older brother three”. And the two cousins are younger then her! But because the aunt is older than her mother, the “older” status transfers down the generation. That older status is reflected in the inter-family relationships and perceived obligations.
It is fascinating to see the structure of language being persistently deployed to reinforce the sublimation of self and reinforcement of familial status and responsibility.
We’ll thats certainly not the “lefty liberal” shining through with that gratuitous use use of derogatory terms for female anatomy as an insult in that comment.
Urdu even has words to describe your exact relationship to different cousins:
- "cousin brother from my father's sister's kids"
- "cousin sister from my mother's brother's kids"
- and even "cousin brother from my father's oldest brother's kids"
There's also a word for "wife's sister's husband", which is "hum zulf". But I spent almost a decade thinking the word was "hum zulm", which literally translates to "co-victim"
Given that spoken Urdu is supposedly very similar to spoken Hindi except some vocabulary stemming from religious differences, does what you describe apply in Hindi? If not, I wonder what cultural insight a difference might reveal.
Hindi has sufficiently diverse and fine-grained kinship terms, far more than English, and enough to baffle Dravidian speakers like us. The terms in Hindi though, seem to be entirely different from that in Urdu.
I think Japanese is more interesting than that; while they are pronounced the same, mother's side aunt and uncle and father's side aunt and uncle are written differently.
Which kind of leads into the cultural shock that everyone in Korea asks you your age right off the bat.
The point of it is not to be rude (as it would be from a Western perspective) but to know how 'hierarchically' you are related so that they know how to address you. Took me long enough to understand this.
I had a class in university on Australian Aboriginal languages with the excellent Alice Gaby, in which we were introduced to the kinship systems in these languages.
Learning Turkish for my SO has caused me a lot of pain. Forget the fact that she has ~20 aunties and uncles trying to remember their names and "role" is a hell of a job!
Ah, Hindi. That's not strictly about age, though, is it? It's as much about relative social status (though age may be one factor in that). So you'd potentially say आप to a younger person than yourself in order to show proper respect, e.g. if they're an important official or similar figure.
- Not being able to specify in one word if a friend is a male friend or female friend like amigo/amiga in Spanish.
- The words for friend, boyfriend and girlfriend are too similar. While in spanish amigo/novio, amiga/novia are completely different.
- Not having one word descriptors for someone's ethnicity, as those have to be used very carefully or can't be used in English ag all. Like "Avisale el chelito que la zarca lo está esperando para ir a la tienda del chino" (common in my dialect of Spanish). "Tell the white-person that the light-eyed-person is waiting for him to go to the store owned by the asian-person" (very unnatural in English).
I don't think your last point is a significant lingual difference, it's a cultural difference. We have those words (you wrote them, just leave off the "person" part), they're just considered offensive to use that way.
Which, in your example sentence, they really shouldn't be - it's just a convenient way of describing appearance. But, well, turns out the culture didn't go that way.
I know that this is a very cultural thing - as an example here in France it's completely unimportant, you would simply address kids (or at least younger kids) a bit differently than adults, but appart from that the age difference does not matter at all (and culturally it's important to know whether someone is a kid or not, because, to simplify, kids are legally "irresponsible", cannot vote, purchase alcohol, etc and some adults must have legal authority over them)
More than 'close attention' in Chinese languages - every term of address is a signifier of your relationship with that person, with the rule of thumb being that you can only address people by name if they are equal or lower in social hierarchy, which is essentially based on age. Anyone who is 'superior' to you in hierarchy must be addressed by title, which is contextual to your relationship to that person and often times only used in that relationship.
i/e my (younger) cousin addresses me as 'second-older-brother-cousin'. She is the only one that does, or can
Hindi distinguishes between your father's younger brother (Chacha) and elder brothere (Tau). Grand children have different names depending on if they are from the daughter or son. I made my mom write down all the relationship names in Hindi, and there are some 34 of them https://yobabita.medium.com/family-relationship-names-in-hin...
P.S.: Original article is paywalled, couldn't read
One thing I always thought was interesting was the value placed in having names for marital ties - we treat relations through marriage with not much specific vocabulary in English, with -in-law being inserted for closer relations like brothers and sisters but not for cousin or uncle, for instance. I wonder if Old English had better terminology for such relations that have dropped in the modern version of the language.
Yes, in Arabic it is so to distinguish family trees and bloodlines, for example if a nursing mother is ill, her baby might breastfeeding from another women, but the offsprings of both become all brothers and sister due to that, they are, as such, not allowed to marry.
What I do not understand is why Dutch is the only language that has two words for "family", one describing the parents and their children (gezin) and the other all relatives (family).
