Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

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.


Spanish distinguishes between cousins from your parent's siblings (primos hermanos), and cousins from your parent's cousins (primos).


As does English, the former are first cousins, the latter second cousins.


how interesting. the same case in most chinese languages




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: