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I'd guess that, in whatever language this is relevant for, there's a "feminine" marker that is ambiguous wrt whether it modifies parent/father into mother or si
by notacoward 5y ago
I'd guess that, in whatever language this is relevant for, there's a "feminine" marker that is ambiguous wrt whether it modifies parent/father into mother or sibling into sister.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoNo, 妹 means younger sister. The reason that your father's brother's daughter is not 表, while children of any of your mother's siblings are, is very simple: your father's brother's daughter belongs to the same family you do. Your mother's siblings' children, like your father's sisters' children, belong to other families.
- notacoward 5y agoThank you for the explanation. I said it was a guess, and it wasn't too far off; either way it's literal patriarchy embedded into the language. I wonder if people's authoritative tone (and downvotes) would change if they discovered that there was also another language where the distinction was meaningful but based on different reasoning.