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.
