Responding to a variety of questions made over the years about this:
This is a constant intended to be displayed after localizing the constant. Its localized value will primarily be displayed to users whose preferred languages have a short word describing the relationship.
But it ALSO needs at least some comprehensible localization in EVERY language, because I can send you a vcard for myself labeling this specific type of cousin (because that’s how I think of her), and I don’t know in advance what languages you use.
The primary customer of this family of constants is a localizer, who by virtue of localizing Apple software needs to know English, but may not read or understand Chinese.
The constant embeds everything that an English-speaking localizer needs to explain the relationship in a different language. That’s why something like the proposal here[0] (just use the Chinese name for this relationship) would not be an improvement.
A fully generic DSL to describe relationships wouldn’t help localizers know which relationships are actually used in the real world.
> The constant embeds everything that an English-speaking localizer needs to explain the relationship in a different language. That’s why something like the [proposal] (just use the Chinese name for this relationship) would not be an improvement.
I don't exactly agree. Note that this constant embeds two terms, exactly because this particular kinship term does not distinguish them. In the other word this constant can only reasonably used in the Chinese kinship system, and others will be confused regardless of whether it's translated or not. The reasonable UI should group such labels into some dedicated section like "Extended families (Chinese system)" so that they don't need to be translated literally. Same for other kinship systems, of course.
You, and many people here keep assuming that this is a feature that is unique to Chinese language and/or kinship system.
It's the main one that English speakers are probably exposed to; but even in this thread there are mentions of other languages and cultures where this or similar relationships have specific terms and more generic ones like "cousin" simply don't exist.
Grouping them all under "Chinese system" is... let's say culturally insensitive.
_That_ is a reason enough to not use the term from any specific language as a constant name; let enough to not expose that in the UI to users.
I am Asian but not Chinese, I know what you wanted to say. The problem is though, East Asian kinship systems are pretty similar in the aspect that it recognizes most differences in gender, age, generation and lineage, but there are considerable variations as well. For example I think this particular term has no Korean counterpart. So this term is indeed unique, though some terms would be also shared among those systems. I would say that the label should be replicated for each system in that case.
Notably, mapping the entire path isn't congruent with the concept in the topic, which encompasses both "Father's sister's daughter, younger than me" and "Mother's sibling's daughter, younger than me" in one phrase.
> this constant embeds two terms, exactly because this particular kinship term does not distinguish them
This isn't the case, any more than the English word 'aunt' embeds four terms (your father's sister, your mother's sister, your father's brother's wife, your mother's brother's wife). Plenty of languages distinguish between all four of these relationships. But the English term refers to what we see as a single concept - an aunt.
Most family words have translation difficulties like this. The concepts are usually more generic, more specific, or in some cases incomparable when moving between cultures. This also applies to many other words - even ones for very prosaic objects. The French have a single word which means "metallic object which has a particular shape in order to be able to turn something matching that shape", and they use additional qualifications to distinguish between a door-opening-shaped-metallic-turner and a bolt-undoing-shaped-metallic-turner.
The localization system seeks to avoid 2 things: that when an English speaker adds 'Mary (relationship: Aunt)' as a contact, they have to be asked "Is Mary actually your fathers-sister-aunt or your mothers-sister-aunt?" (Because that person would find it strange and unncessary.) Secondly that where possible, someone who has access to this information in another locale, doesn't see a low-quality translation, in particular one which makes no sense ("US English Kinship Relation �� Mary"), or which is misleading ("Mary is John's father's brother's wife? But I'm married to John's father's only brother!"). The right way to do this is to record a reasonable representation of the intended meaning in the source locale, and to translate into the destination locale. Since English also happens to be the language used for the code, the value "LabelContactRelationAunt" looks less complicated than this one, but it really isn't.
This can be seen by how it will be translated. In a locale where the English concepts encompasses two words, it might be rendered as "(Father-Aunt) or (Mother-Aunt)". In a locale where there are 4, 8 or more relationships which could be described in English as an aunt, they might use something intentionally less specific like "OlderFemaleRelativeNotAGrandmother" rather than a laundry list of possibilities. In others yet it might make sense to use the literal English word, or a contextualization like "Western 'Aunt'", if that's the easiest way to explain the relationship.
Nothing about this is unique to either English or Chinese.
I think this UI issue shows a problem in thinking about what the actual problem is that they're trying to solve.
This bug is about contact cards, and so the relationship is necessarily between you and the contact. So, it's not like you need to translate 表妹 into English, or differentiate it from 表姐 in English, as it's something you have chosen to describe the relationship. If you just think of them as "cousin" or whatever you use in your language, that's fine, just use that label. But, once you've assigned e.g. 表妹 to a contact, you don't need to translate that to English if you change your locale... because you already know what it means, because you chose it in the first place!
Admittedly, there's an issue when you receive a contact from someone else, but then you will probably be changing that field anyway. Unless we are family, you sending me a contact for your aunt is unlikely to also be my aunt, and if it is, well I probably also share that native language with you. I'm sure there are edge cases, like siblings who were separated when very young and the parents moved to different countries, or adopted, or found via DNA testing or whatever. But even in those few contexts, learning about the word or having the person themselves explaining the relationship to you, probably helps overall understanding of the relationship.
In any case, a lot of the Chinese words for the various familial relationships are quite amorphous. I remember being very surprised when a Chinese friend posted some photos on Wechat of her 孙子, literally "son's son". My initial reaction was "She can't be old enough to have a grandson!" then "Wait? She has a son? I thought she was single..." Turns out, she was referring to her brother's son. Lots of people use 哥, 弟弟, 妹妹, 姐姐 (literally older brother, younger brother, younger sister, older sister) to mean their friendship group, although this is probably a result of the impact of the one child policy. 阿姨 and 叔叔 (aunt and uncle) are just respectful terms for people of similar age to your parents, etc. There's literally no point trying to translate these names into their literal English meaning, because it will just further confuse people.
So, then the big problem becomes where these labels come from. Is it a dropdown box where only the options available in your current language are presented? How do you then choose one that's available in a different language if that's what you want to use? Presumably these aren't translated too literally into other languages, as e.g. an English speaker isn't going to want to choose one of 4 options for "cousin", and hopefully would be immediately suspicious of why their phone wants that much information about the nature of their cousin-ness, when it's customary to just use a single word. How then would that get translated back into Chinese? It would be embarrassing at family events if someone saw that the male cousin on my mum's side was labelled as female cousin on my dad's side.
I think it'd be much easier if you could just type what you wanted into this relationship field, maybe with a drop-down or auto-complete for likely options in your language.
It's actually a relation between two contacts, not between you and the contact. The UI allows the user to link several contacts, e.g. link the "spouse" or "brother" contact to your friend's contact card. There's a set of predefined labels to choose from, and there's also an option to add a custom label.
>I think it'd be much easier if you could just type what you wanted into this relationship field, maybe with a drop-down or auto-complete for likely options in your language.
Congratulations, you reinvented the exact UI for this that already exists in iOS from first principles.
> Lots of people use 哥, 弟弟, 妹妹, 姐姐 (literally older brother, younger brother, younger sister, older sister) to mean their friendship group, although this is probably a result of the impact of the one child policy.
Use of kinship terms to describe non-kin is clearly not related to the one-child policy given that it’s a language feature of Chinese that occurs across multiple political lines. It also appears in other languages, such as Korean.
Chinese also differentiates kin vs non-kin address. 哥哥 is typically used to describe a blood relation. 哥 and 哥哥 have very different connotations if used to refer to a non-relative.
Because that would include father's brother's daughter, which the Chinese term apparently excludes, hence it then wouldn’t be correct to localize it to the Chinese term.
> The constant embeds everything that an English-speaking localizer needs to explain the relationship in a different language.
I disagree insofar as you really need the explanatory text in the documentation to be able to parse the constant’s name correctly, especially if you’re not already familiar with that specific relationship category. It would also be helpful for the documentation to point to the Chinese/Vietnamese/etc. terms to provide context. In that light, a shorter constant name would have been appropriate IMO, for developer ergonomics.
Even if you want to include “full” information, CNLabelContactRelationYoungerMaleCousinNotViaFathersBrother would have been shorter, if I understand the relationship correctly. (The fact that I’m not entirely sure here also indicates that more documentation is needed.)
are there multiple languages that have this exact relationship concept? because if it’s in a single language or family of languages, the idea that it can be translates into something generic seems questionable
I don't speak Armenian, but I dated an Armenian woman once, and she told me they have words for familial relationships that we didn't really have concepts for in English.
At least in danish, we have “bedstemor” which behaves likes “oldemor” in being the mother or fathers mom so it’s really that form that is consistent with the system and not the parent-specific forms.
I am fairly sure English doesn't have (or at least does not use) separate everyday words for farmor/farfar (fathers mother / fathers mother) or mormor/morfar (same for mothers parents).
Sure in academic language there is probably a way to describe it (edit: and the concept is easy to explain) but there is nothing quick that you can use to tell a kid so they immediately know which of the grandparents we are going to visit without naming them or the location they live in somehow?
Even among the words that do exist, like "siblings", I have a feeling that in some dialects or sociolects it isn't used and people say "brothers and sisters" instead. (I'm not sure about this last one but I have worked with a lot of English and American people over the years and it does feel this way).
I can't tell if this is serious. I don't even know which language you're using but it is literally no different than mom's mom and dad's mom other than a space.
And I am not saying the concept doesn't exist, only that as far as I am aware there is no usable everyday word for it.
I mean: nobody will tell their kids they are going to visit dads mum and dads dad next week, rather than telling them they are going to visit grandma and granddad "across the country" or something?
Things like this can be highly family-specific. A friend of mine (German) says that in his family, his grandmothers are distinguished as "Oma" and "Omi". Which are both generic German words for any grandmother, but in his family, they are more specific. Like names. Another friend, they used "Oma" and "Großmutter" (a third generic word) to distinguish the two.
So there must certainly be families in the English-speaking world where kids commonly say "dad's dad" and "mom's dad". Even when unlike in Scandinavian languages, it's not the canonical form.
I think it's more common to call them Grandma and Grandpa Lastname or Grandma Firstname and Grandpa Firstname. I've also seen it where one set of grandparents are Grandma and Grandpa and the other set is Nana and Papa or Mimi and Pop Pop or whatever set of less formal terms they use for the relations.
I'm not sure I've met anyone who doesn't have more familiar terms than dad's mom and mom's mom. They're probably out there, but not super common.
The point of the conversation is how people express these relationships in their day-to-day so they can be encoded in software.
Would your grandparents' contact be saved on your phone as "Mom's mom" or as "grandma"? Probably the second, which is indistinguishable from "grandma" as "Dad's mom".
In Norwegian, people would naturally call these "mormor" and "farmor" and they would expect that relationship to be correctly labeled in their localized app.
I am fully aware of what the topic is about. I'm just pointing out that the English language and native English speakers definitely use the concept of mom's mom and dad's mom without the needing "official" words like "momdad" and "dadmom" because the person I responded to said
> I am fairly sure English doesn't have (or at least does not use) separate everyday words for farmor/farfar.
They then said you would need "academic" language to describe mom's mom and dad's mom. That's why I said I could not tell if they were serious. Anyway, I think you would be surprised if you asked English speakers what they call their grandparents. I personally used memere and grandma to distinguish between my mom's mom and my dad's mom. The point I'm making is that not having specific words for these relationships does not make English speakers unaware of the difference.
For day-to-day familiar conversation we generally use nicknames for grandparents in the US and that's what is in our contact list.
There are probably hundreds or thousands of nickname words for grandma based on a variety of cultural backgrounds, family tradition, and mispronunciations by grandchildren.
The language we use really depends on setting. In a more formal setting we might say paternal grandmother/grandparent.
Speaking to a friend we might use the nickname, or we might say the ambiguous 'grandma' or we might say 'grandmother on my dad's side' or 'dad's mom'.
It really depends on the situation and familiarity and formality.
There is no "grandmother" in Swedish, you just have mormor and farmor. That makes a huge difference with how you have to use the language, you can't say "do you have a grandparent" since there is no word for grandparent, you will have to say "do you have any mom or father parents".
I would have accepted it if it was something people would actually say, even if it was written like two words or more. Example: sister/brother in law is something that is close enough even if it isn't written in one word like Norwegian svigerinne/svoger.
But as far as I am aware English only uses grandsomething (or variations of it) + further description as needed.
In everyday speech you generally do not try to be this specific, but if you wanted to (e.g. recounting family history to a doctor or talking about the relationship between your parents and granparents) you could use them to be more specific in a clear way.
I agree that almost every use of farfar should be simply translated as grandmother.
English speaking people do not use these all that often. They say "grandmother" or "grandfather". They specify which side of family these come from only when they really need it for some reason.
Not Armenian, but, e.g., Bulgarian has a distinct name for the relation of two husbands of (not in-law) sisters. In English, that's just one of the "brother in-law" cases.
On the whole, Bulgarian has far more such relationship words than English.
English doesn't have any way of distinguishing between my wife's sister, my brother's wife, and my wife's brother's wife. They are all sisters-in-law. But these 3 relationships are very different for many people in practice. My wife's sister grew up with someone I'm very close to and unlike most other relatives I can't usually badmouth her to my wife. My brother's wife is someone who, like my wife, entered as an adult into a family which I and my brother have always been part of and so might feel threatened by our closeness. And my wife's brother's wife is someone who I can bond with over "we both married into this crazy family and are not really like the rest of them".
And then from my kid's point of view, not only are these all 'auntie' but so is my very own sister.
In the Tagalog (Filipino) language, we have the following words which are of Hokkien import:
* parent-in-law - biyenan
* son- or daughter-in-law - manugang
* brother-in-law - bayaw
* sister-in-law - hipag
* the spouse of your brother- or sister-in-law - bilas
We also have the following words for siblings which are influenced by Hokkien:
(male first, then female)
* elder sibling - kuya / ate (or aya / achi)
* second eldest - diko / ditse
* third eldest - sanso or sangko / sanse
* youngest sibling (male or female) - bunso (or siobe)
I've also heard my grandaunts call my grandfather "siaho" (the eldest sister's husband) but I don't know what's the equivalent word for the eldest brother's wife.
Well it can be. To me, my spouse's sibling's husband is just...my spouse's sibling's husband and nothing else. Some vague acquaintance I may vaguely see once every decade when someone die or get married in my spouse family.
It really depends how tight knit families are and how families are spread accross the world. I have to take a plane and cross some borders in order to visit my parents or my sibling's and same applies to my partner so there is that.
It gets even more complex when there are regional and family differences in the naming schema. For example, my cousins on my moms side and dads sides respectively use different words for some relations, and then they sometimes use an entirely different set of words with their other sides of the family. All in the same language, but based on background, dialect, etc. So my working knowledge of naming schema ends up being very, very large. Thankfully the relations they map to are standardized in the language so it's just word swapping.
Prepared to be surprised, for large numbers of people all with different languages [1] these are very different relationships - the people your sister might marry are potentially an entirely different skin group to the brothers of whomever you might marry [2].
( This was once way more complicated in stricter days as both Matrilineal and Patrilineal moieties were intertwined across adjacent territorries - leading to a complex system of exogamous out rotation .. the wikipedia pages fail to fully capture a complete picture with all local variations [3] )
You're correct that most people in Western society see those relationships as similar - I have no idea if that remains true once you start including Indian, south east asian, and other people across the globe.
It's funny. A Tamil friend of mine from a specific group would not differentiate between her 1st cousins and her siblings. So her female cousin was her "sister" and her biological sister was also "sister". Likewise for brother.
She was surprised to learn that we don't recognize the similarity of those relationships.
I suspect the appearing naturalness of this is all down to whether or not you grew up with it.
I think that's very common in South Asian languages. Same goes for uncles and aunts. You just extend the family outwards and carry relations with as much fidelity as you can. So a lot of "brothers/sisters/uncles/aunts" are children of my aunt's (through marriage) brother, for example.
Edit: I bet there is a term/prefix for "direct" relationships in Tamil. In Telugu, for example, everyone is "anna" or "mama" but you can use prefixes like "mena-" i.e. "mena-mama" to imply it's a direct uncle. But you only use that distinction when you directly need to specify the relationship. You'd still call them or refer to them as "mama"
"First cousin where at least one of the sibling parents is female" is easy enough to recognize too, I just wonder why you'd do it that way. Why group together "mother's brother", "mother's sister", and "father's sister", but keep it separate from "father's brother"?
And then specifying "younger" and the gender of the cousin is straightforward enough.
Agnatic[0] cultures placing great significance on who’s in line to inherit the family’s wealth and who’s not, is my guess.
As a commenter in the thread two years ago noted[1], this represents (in Agnatic cultures) “female cousin who is not part of my close family (different last names)”.
Oh, "different last names" is an interesting aspect.
Someone else linked a page on Chinese kinship terms but it gave an incorrectly simplified definition for the same term so I didn't realize it was a match.
It has to have been 20-ish years ago now (pre-smartphone/pocket internet), but I was traveling in Europe and my friends and we stayed in a hostel with a young woman from China.
We had a terribly hard time explaining the idea of "cousin." Once we did, she explained that she was unfamiliar with the concept because her family (and apparently all the families she knew well) had only had single children for generations.
I assumed there had to have been a word for it at some point, and that people were probably using it somewhere, but she seemed quite sincere in telling us she knew no such word.
The young woman in your anecdote is an extreme outlier. First, her family and all families she knew well only had a single child for generations; if that’s the case for most people, the population would shrink rapidly, so obviously most families aren’t like that. Secondly, to be unfamiliar with the concept at all, she had to be unfamiliar with some household names from cornerstones of Chinese literature, taught in grade school; very unlikely for a literate person. She also had to distance herself from television and the like, which was achievable twenty years ago.
Apologies for not using a better source than wikipedia, but I could believe that the anecdotal woman was not such an outlier, when you take into account that whole "one child policy" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
That only started in 1979, with limited enforcement throughout, and gp’s talking about families with only one child for generations (probably >=3 in the context but at least 2) circa 2000 which is only one generation removed, so that’s only a small factor. Especially considering China’s population doubled from 1949 to 1979.
I also discussed the indirect/cultural factor where one should learn about this. There are two complementary factors here: if the young woman was rural there was practically no way she never encountered a family with multiple children; if she was urban it was more likely she was educated and thus should at least learn about it from school and/or through literature.
I don't perceive those relations as similar, although they are related - kinda mirror images of each other. One is the partner of family, the other is family of the partner. In the former case I expect to have the connecting person's (i.e. my sibling's) loyalty if push comes to shove, and in the latter case I expect the brother-in-law to have the connection's (i.e. my spouse's) loyalty.
If you squint hard enough - yes. I do not know if it is Sapir-Whorf, but if I grew up using completely different words for sisters of my spouse, brothers of my spouse, husband of my sister, and wife of my brother, they do not look that similar to me.
I really don't have to squint all that hard to recognize that these two people are both near-adjacent on the family tree and they both are non-blood relatives that I see almost as much as my actual siblings. When described in writing, the grouping seems strange, when those two relationships are actually experienced, it seems quite intuitive to me.
No I didn't understand that, since aunt and uncle doesn't mean that in my language. I thought it was just parents sister and brother, I didn't know that parent in laws were also considered aunts and uncles.
I guess I’m trying to say it doesn’t need a word to understand those are similar positions on a family tree. We happen to have words for that in English but even if you didn’t I’d think you’d realize these people are related to you in similar ways - I could be wrong and that’s not obvious, I figured it would be but I can’t deny my ignorance of how other cultures think about things and how their languages effects that
uncle/aunt is wildcard relation and means little. Actually in Russian for example it is the same word you use to describe a random person whom you may not even have any relation to
There's a lot of languages where aunt/uncle is just a polite word that children can use to refer to older adults who are not their parents (in some languages there is an upper age limit, where it becomes polite to refer to these as grandma/grandpa).
And some languages where all the different varieties of father's brother's wife have their own distinguishing names, but then there's also a generic term which means 'older person of one gender who usually comes to the house on $HOLIDAY'.
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
Something I find sad about this is that many people really don’t know how to think about themselves in that context; in this way we aren’t a someone to other people so much as a something.
I know this isn’t a firm rule, but there are many people in my life who I’m certain wouldn’t have a good grasp of how they fit into their family and community beyond fairly superficial platitudes.
Maybe this has been true in the past as well. I wouldn’t know.
Back then almost everyone was a peasant so you wouldn't get any information about their interests, social status, etc. from just their career like you (somewhat) do now.
People still do this in small US towns. Your last name defines who you are to the town heritage. If you have the wrong last name, then you don't matter.
As non-contrarian as it sounds, I'd argue that as someone who came from a small town, having to define yourself by your "tribe" last name is worse, because if it the "wrong" last name, there's nothing you can do about it. You can, within reason, change what you do for a living.
Sure, I could logically make that connection. But I guess comparing it to something like Nigerian where all friends/family of an equal level are "brother"/"sister" or higher level "aunty"/"uncle", it seems weird to see English flattened so much. The language is specific to level (grand), node depth (x removed) and colinears (brother, sister, cousin, 2nd cousin, etc) that you can accurately describe pretty much any lineage.
When you compare it like that, it gets the author's point across even better to show how the language and culture play into each other. That being that anglophone cultures are very cold/distant to the importance of family on your life, outside of social convention (and how important that structure/convention is); while others (Hawaiian or Nigerian, for instance) treat family as a fluid and inviting unit of kinship.
You see this in the more "warm cultured" English regions (a good chunk of the US, Australia, etc) where it's common to refer to family friends as "aunt"/"uncle", or "cousin"; almost in defiance of the linguistic history.
In other words, I think the topic is fascinating and deserves even more depth compared to how it was broken down there.
> I guess comparing it to something like Nigerian where all friends/family of an equal level are "brother"/"sister" or higher level "aunty"/"uncle", it seems weird to see English flattened so much.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘Nigerian’, but that sounds to me like a Hawaiian kinship system, which is different to the Eskimo kinship system found in English.
> The language is specific to level (grand), node depth (x removed) and colinears (brother, sister, cousin, 2nd cousin, etc) that you can accurately describe pretty much any lineage.
My understanding of the kinship system classifications is that they’re focussed on the most basic terms. You can refer to ‘my mother’s father’s sister’s son’ in pretty much any language, but it’s most interesting to see which terms are considered basic (because that in turn reveals ‘how language and culture play into each other’, as you say).
Interestingly, when we were hosting some Ukrainian refugees recently, "sister" or "brother" could refer to a literal sibling or a cousin. I was unaware of different kinship terminologies until today (thanks again, HN), but that kind of nomenclature is similar to the Hawaiian system.
> Although `​` is one HTML5 named entity for U+200B, the additional names `NegativeMediumSpace`, `NegativeThickSpace`, `NegativeThinSpace` and `NegativeVeryThinSpace` (which are names used in the Wolfram Language for negative-advance spaces, which it maps to the Private Use Area) are also defined by HTML5 as aliases for U+200B (e.g. `​`).
Following links, it looks like somebody went through a bunch of mathematics software looking for all the symbol names somebody might be used to, so they could be added to the official list of named entities.
That is interesting. In many English speaking cultures children will informally refear to their mother's parents and father's parents by different names even if formally they are both "grandmother", "grandfather" or "grandparent". I like that in China they formalised the names.
Scandinavian languages have the same. »Mormor« (lit. mum mum) means maternal grandmother, while »farmor« (lit. dad mum) means paternal grandmother. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to continue beyond that (so no »mormormor«).
Sure do, you can just keep stacking, almost like in English.
But where English just has "great great grandmother", In Swedish you can specify exactly which one of the eight people you mean, was it your "mormors farmor" or your "farmors mormor" perhaps? Or I could say something like my "farfars farfars mormors mormors morfars morfars farfar" was a Walloon immigrant to Sweden in the early 1600's, unlike my "farfars farfars farfars farfars farfars far" who was a German immigrant to Sweden in the late 1600's.
However, in practice, it's very rare for people three generations back or more to be alive, so most people only have one or two of these, if any at all, and people usually prepend "gammel-" (lit. "old") in front. So if you have a "gammelfarmor", that's either your father's father's mother, or your father's mother's mother, or your mother's father's mother for example.
The list is blowing my mind. A word for your mom's sibling's daughter if she's older than you, and another one if she's younger? What a dense piece of data!
A few possibilities for two dads, and it would be analogous for two moms:
“Dad” (interchangeably either one)
Use different father words as per family preference. These could be variations of the same family word, like dad and daddy or papa and pops, or entirely separate words like dad and papa.
Use the dads’ first names, either with a father word or without. I know some people who call their grandma “Mama <name>” because she acts like a second mother; no reason it couldn’t refer to an actual mother. That happens to be a non-English example, but it could have been in English. Similarly, I know someone who addressed his (unfortunately now-deceased) parents by first name with no parent word, in English, even though he had the conventional pairing of a mother and a father.
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.
In my family we gave different words to the different grandparents, but chose more or less at random. This made the words unique and therefore more useful.
It's not an "issue" for parents, exactly, but it is an interesting choice because of how much less trodden a path it is. Would you both go by dad? Would one or both be daddy, dadda, or pop? Would you use first names or diminutives after a certain age?
While I called my grandmothers by different names, I called both my grandfathers the same name. They were never in the same room together, so it was never an issue.
I called all three of my grandfathers (mom's parents divorced and remarried long before I was born) "Grandpa" to their faces, but if I spoke about "Grandpa" at dinner, I still needed a way to specify which one.
In Germany it used to be quite common to just say Oma (grandma) and then the village name. So "Oma Salzgitter" would be the perfectly accepted way of referencing to one of your grandmas.
It got out of fashion though, not really common anymore at least in my circle.
Some languages do make a distinction between the patrilineal and matrilineal grandparents, though I suppose having 2 of the same gender parent means you just use the pat/matrilineal of whatever gender your parents are :P
I don't think it would be good to have a deterministic way to decide who gets to be called what in that case. The world would be a better place if we didn't make a distinction between mother and father, though obviously that's baked into almost all cultures and fully removing that would cause more problems than it would solve. Given that we don't have preexisting momentum to make a distinction between two parents of the same gender, I don't think we should try to standardize anything. Just pick two arbitrary titles like "dad" and "papa" and assign them randomly.
I think the fact that it's baked into biology in the overwhelming majority of cases is why distinguishing between mother and father is so entrenched in practically every culture.
Agreed. Part of my point is that these days, the biological difference is becoming less and less relevant to the "cultural" difference between mother and father.
I wonder how long it might take evolution to catch up with the shift in cultural mores, or whether we'll successfully overcome pretty much the whole history of humanity with technology.
Sometimes it feels like we've found a fence in a field and started tearing it down because, today, we don't want it to be there, but I'm not as confident as I'd like to be that there wasn't some reason the fence was built that we haven't discovered yet. I'm not confident that there is, either. I'm just apprehensive about trying to change something in a few generations that developed over millennia.
Are we definitely more astute than the way the planet and the universe directed human development? Maybe. But also maybe not.
Like others noted in the thread about grandparents, in Scandinavia we'd say morbror (mother-brother) and farbror (father-brother).
What's fun though is that 'farbror' can also be used (in Swedish) for any neutral/kindly spirited or acquainted old man, so maybe we're not too practical after all.
> What's fun though is that 'farbror' can also be used (in Swedish) for any neutral/kindly spirited or acquainted old man, so maybe we're not too practical after all.
English has "avuncular" as an adjective to describe any friendly uncle-like person.
It's similar in most Indian languages. There are specific words for mom/dad side uncles and aunts. Also most of times same words are used for their friends or any known female/male that is around the same age group as mom/dad.
> Also mom's sister's husband and dad's sister's husband.
I'm curious to know how common this is. It was always the norm for me, but sometimes I got the feeling I had accidentally mislead people when talking about my 'uncle' (Mum's sister's husband), whom they expected to be a blood relative of mine.
Wait, do different people use the cousin words differently or is this page flat-out wrong? And not just wrong, but wrong about the exact term under discussion.
This page says Táng vs. Biǎo is based on whether it's on your father's side or mother's side. But the whole point of the "or" in MothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter is that Táng is for the children of two male siblings, and Biǎo is for the children of any other gender pairing.
seems regional. i use tang for all cousins on my father's side, without exceptions.
the cousin differentiation is probably one of the more meaningless differentiations anyway - when addressing our cousins directly or within the family, we simply address them by ge or jie if they are our seniors, and directly by name if they are our juniors.
I had no idea people label their family relationships in their contacts, but only one of my parents had a sibling survive to adulthood, and I only have two cousins, so I guess it's just not something I've ever had to worry about tracking.
In India, even before we get to cousins, we have distinct terms for father/mother's siblings of same and opposite genders. Same gender elder/younger siblings of your parents have different pronouns that translate this way in Kannada (Language of Karnataka state):
senior-father - ದೊಡ್ಡಪ್ಪ (doddaappa) for elder brother of father,
senior-mother - ದೊಡ್ಡಮ್ಮ (doddammA) for elder sister of mother,
junior-father – ಚಿಕ್ಕಪ್ಪ (chikkappa) for younger brother of father,
junior-mother - ಚಿಕ್ಕಮ್ಮ (chikkammA) for younger sister of mother.
Their spouses get the same seniority title with appropriate gender.
Then, opposite gender siblings of your parents get pronouns that are more conceptually closer to uncle/aunt. But here, there's no seniority distinction.
As someone of asian descent, I find it interesting how so many of these comments have such a stereotypical software engineer's "why don't they just XYZ" statement and its pretty eye opening.
I know I'm guilty of this at times too, but this example is really funny to me, and I guess I'll try rein in my assumptions that people are irrational in the future.
This pattern is pretty common on HN. Shallow dismissal and or overconfident alternative solution coming from those without any domain expertise (but that's okay because knowing how to code magically makes your ideas worth entertaining apparently).
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 relevant what about the father’s older sister’s younger daughter, etc.
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.
Book translators / authors must have a field day with this.
Let's say that a character in book 1 suspects his cousin of committing a murder, and nothing else is revealed about that cousin (let's say it's a side plot) until book 5, where new evidence turns up and he is suddenly found guilty. If you differentiate between male and female cousin, how do you translate book 1 if book 5 hasn't been written yet?
Even better, let's assume the books are finished, the author is dead, but you're translating to a language that differentiates between younger/older cousins / cousins on different sides of the family. You just pick whichever word you like more. Ten years later, Hollywood makes a movie adaptation, and the "male cousin" from your translation is played by none other than Angelina Jollie. Your readers are very confused.
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?
If you speak Chinese, there is a specific word for this relationship.
Relationship labels should capture the actual labels people routinely use.
Apple does not offer this label to English-speakers, unless you have Chinese as one of your additional languages.
Similarly, if English is not one of your languages, the label for “cousin” will not appear, which is localized in an even more convoluted way in Chinese.
While you have a point, imagine the string appearing in a combo box or other list of relationship kinds. It would be very confusing to have multiple options that are all just "cousin".
To solve both that use case and the ones you have in mind, the API could perhaps be extended with a language-aware "normalization" procedure that maps relationship labels in a way that loses information but produces a more canonical label for that language. And you'd use that API only in those cases where it makes sense.
But then that would lead to a contact being displayed slightly differently in different settings, which may in itself be confusing to users.
At some point you just have to give up and call it good enough.
That’s not the use case I imagine. When setting relationships in a Chinese localization this option appears with the correct characters in the dropdown. If that contact is shared with an English locale the attribute is still set but it displays as “cousin”.
In Apple Contacts, you can add a relationship to contact. There is a drop down for label with "mother", "son", etc. Then there is "All Labels" which has a ton of relationships.
In US, separating out "younger sister" is weird, they probably should collapse the list. But in others like Chinese, some of the collapsed relationships have different words.
Many Asian cultures, including Chinese, have a wider variety of kinship terms than English. The (unwieldy) name of this constant describes one such relationship which doesn't have a direct equivalent in English.
These labels are often used in Chinese & similar relationship models. It comes from the dual consequence of tightknit multi-generation families & a dense symbol-derived language. In Chinese, you can derive the term for a given relative within 2 characters using this relationship model.
I once had to fill out security paperwork listing everybody I have had regular contact with in the last 10 years. My wife's father divorced her mom and then remarried and had another kid. The form insisted that all family relations had to be categorized, but there was no category for "step brother-in-law".
I actually think the lack of specificity in this case is a win. And I'm no Anglosupremacist. After all, what good is a language that doesn't contain a which-eth question word everyone knows?
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.
Two of my cousins were adopted out, found the family as adults, and immediately had a child together. That child is now an adult, and members of his generation ask, what do we call the guy, "unclecousin"?
Languages like Polish are even worse, because you have to go in reverse, from the person described to yourself. It's the great great grandmother of the cousin of the uncle of the ex wife of your sister, not your sister's ex wife's uncle's great great grandmother.
Russian has some neat words for in-law relationships, but I'd say vast majority of the population never uses it and has to hit the dictionary when they encounter it in the literature. Which IMHO is a pity.
I always thought it was awkward that both [male spouse of sibling] and [male spouse of spouse's sibling] are both called "Brother-in-law" in American English usage, but this level of specificity is bananas to me.
Yes! English isn't always a great language... I do like the meaning behind it though. You are a brother, even if not in biology, we'll embrace you. It just doesn't work well for genealogists.
After understanding the reason this exists, am I alone thinking that this named constant probably shouldn't exist and rather that such relationships should be described by literal constructions of a small set of basic family relationships? That is, instead of saying grand-mother you would build a value such as "MotherOf(DirectParentOf(Me()))"
If this exists, there's probably also a LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughterInstanceManagerFactoryInterface somewhere...
For someone on Android - why do they have these constants at all? If people need to add metadata to remember who their contacts are, why not free text field?
Android has exactly the same way of specifying relationships (I think it comes from vCard spec?); though their list of named constants is much smaller:
If you have the relationship setup in your contact, you can tell Siri to call your wife/sister/younger cousin etc.
Siri will also set up the relationship automatically if you tell her to “call my wife”, and don’t have that relationship set - she will ask who your wife is, update the contact, and make the call.
It’s pretty neat if your family names are hard for (English) Siri to understand, because you can just “hey siri call my wife” instead of trying to “hey siri call <mangled mispronounced name of my wife that might get Siri to pick up the name correctly>”.
What if I want to call my boss? Or my hairdresser? Or my hairdresser's uncle? If Siri can do speech recognition, can't it compare the result to a generic text field?
I translated this into: Matrilineal-descent cousin. As in either the cousin from your mother's line, or the cousin from your aunts on your father's side.
In my culture, we have matrilineal decent inheritance so this is person is who inherits your non-personal property. They're one of the most important people in your lives.
Interesting! Reminds me in Japanese how you can (almost) tell what a sibling is composed of just by looking at the kanji characters. These are ALL read as "kyoudai":
兄弟：Elder brother, younger brother
姉弟：Elder sister, younger brother
兄妹：Elder brother, younger sister
The 4th remaining case is 姉妹, and is read "shimai".
It’s largely a concept that doesn’t exist in English. All our parents’ siblings’ offspring are simply “cousins”; regardless of which parent, or which of their siblings, etc.
So what is the language that has the same word/phrase for MothersSiblingsDaughter and FathersSistersDaughter (but presumably not FathersBrothersDaughter)?
This project seems like an architect just gave up and said fine, you get an enum value for any relationship you can think of, what do people want? And this was one suggestion.
This enum could have been replaced with data model where you set of a bunch of relationship links:
I am confused by the "younger" denotation, because it seems strangely specific to just the last relationship, rather than all of the links.
If you have a lot of relations, it would be easier to just create a family tree then you can skip having to have multiple duplicate links being created for say each cousin.
Making software that works across cultures (and especially _as many_ cultures as Apple's software does) is difficult.
I guarantee you that every single one of those enum cases exists, because there is a language/culture where there is a specific word to describe that relationship; not "because an architect gave up".
I didn't know there were words for those in other languages. I guess I'd still prefer an expressive composable model for them so that I could reason about them. At least know who is related to who in which way, rather than these enums. But I guess that is outside of the scope for Apple - they just want that short name in the UX somewhere when adding a contact.
The point is that you don’t need to reason about the relationship because the name, in the local language, tells you everything you need to know. Of course, if you don’t speak the language then that’s not useful but the code is written for the end user to be able to use the labels, not for the software or its developer to be able to parse the family tree :)
Even if it's modeled with more compositional finesse in the code, you still need a UI level label for this combination of relationships in some culture where there's an appropriate term for it, so you still end up with some label like this.
Localizing, this falls into the things you thought about x are true.
This is the end result of a bunch of switches and ifs in a ui where your model, in very specific circumstances, boils down to a few words that most people understand without computer programming experience.
> I am confused by the "younger" denotation, because it seems strangely specific to just the last relationship, rather than all of the links.
In many cultures you address someone differently depending on whether they are younger or older than you.
> This enum could have been replaced with data model where you set of a bunch of relationship links:
How is that going to look on the user side? Most people just want to label their contact "Mom" and be done with it, they don't want to construct a family tree and say "this person is an older female parent" or maybe even "older elder female parent" if they have two moms.
You might think "well Mom is clearly an exception" but that's a very North America point of view. A lot of cultures would find it weird if you could label someone as 어머니 but not 장모 because they're equally important.
Someone who started it probably regretted it later. If these enum values don’t differentiate something in os/ab code, then it should be just a text field, a boolean or an enum of a different kind that reflects the difference. On its own it’s just an unreasonable complexity.
"younger cousin (mother's sibling's daughter or father's sister's daughter)"
If you have an iPhone, you can check all of those out by going to Contacts.app, tapping "edit" > add related name > tap on the blue "mother" > scroll down to bottom and tap on "All Labels".
This feature is exclusively for the CN market. Where they have a very specific work for each of those.
and it is probably to improve siri. So people can say "call 伯伯" and Siri knows *exactly* which uncle you mean. which is probably some killer feature that only android phones from huwai had before.
This is a constant intended to be displayed after localizing the constant. Its localized value will primarily be displayed to users whose preferred languages have a short word describing the relationship.
But it ALSO needs at least some comprehensible localization in EVERY language, because I can send you a vcard for myself labeling this specific type of cousin (because that’s how I think of her), and I don’t know in advance what languages you use.
The primary customer of this family of constants is a localizer, who by virtue of localizing Apple software needs to know English, but may not read or understand Chinese.
The constant embeds everything that an English-speaking localizer needs to explain the relationship in a different language. That’s why something like the proposal here[0] (just use the Chinese name for this relationship) would not be an improvement.
A fully generic DSL to describe relationships wouldn’t help localizers know which relationships are actually used in the real world.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716546