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Some languages pay closer attention to family ties than others
- ginko 4y ago>Spanish, for example, has a term for your spouse’s sibling’s husband Can't read the full article so I don't know if it's mentioned but in German that would be your Schwippschwager.
- shaggyfrog 4y agoThere’s a great video by NativLang on different kinship systems: https://youtu.be/YOi2c2d3_Lk https://youtu.be/YOi2c2d3_Lk
- rahimnathwani 4y agoRelated threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341855
- naniwaduni 4y agoSome languages, like Swift,
- andrewjl 4y agoJudging from the CN prefix, that is all Objective-C. Thank you global namespacing! Swift doesn't have this issue due to compiler-support for mangling.
- gnicholas 4y ago> 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.
- delecti 4y agoOn 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- forty 4y agoIt'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.
- el-salvador 4y ago> 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?
- lmm 4y agoIMO it doesn't. I would say my sister-in-law's husband.
- gnicholas 4y agoIMO 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!
- vt85 4y ago
- hargup 4y agoHindi 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-hindi-f4d8b19e52c4 https://yobabita.medium.com/family-relationship-names-in-hin... P.S.: Original article is paywalled, couldn't read
- kaesar14 4y agoThe same thing with Telugu - found this horribly confusing as a child. Link to Telugu: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~vemuri/classes/freshman/family.htm https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~vemuri/classes/freshman/family.h... 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.
- umeshunni 4y agoSuper interesting. Can someone create a page with all these mappings for all Indian languages (or at least Dravidian languages)?
- HKH2 4y agoIn 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.
- zoomablemind 4y ago>... In Mandarin there are so many titles, and even family friends can get them. I also heard that it's customary to mention the titles instead of resp. names. That is instead of saying Aunt Jane, they'd need to say a specific title in the father's or mother's hierarchy.
- HKH2 4y agoThat's definitely the case for relatives of previous generations. You never address them by name.
- k_sze 4y agoNote, 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.
- vore 4y agoTo 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!
- keybored 4y agoEnglish is way to formal with its sirs, ma’ams, doctors, professors, and so on.
- sitharus 4y ago
- belkarx 4y agoUnpaywalled link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220603015344/https://www.economist.com/culture/2022/06/02/some-languages-pay-closer-attention-to-family-ties-than-others https://web.archive.org/web/20220603015344/https://www.econo...)
- throwawaymaths 4y agoI 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.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoThat's because the writing was imported from Chinese, with the indigenous Japanese labels slapped on top. This is quite common even for basic words, eg 日 "sun" vs 火 "fire" both read hi, or 早い "early" vs 速い "fast" both hayai.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoIs that not interesting?
- thematrixturtle 4y agoIt is! But now you know why it's that way.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoI already did, thank you :) but yes, thanks for explaining to everyone else.
- gumby 4y agoFunny, 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.
- hosh 4y agoManderin 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.
- googlryas 4y ago> 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).
- hosh 4y agoRMS tried to promote the use of “perse”, “per”, derived from “person”. As with anything, accepted usage depends on if it becomes viral.
- kodah 4y ago> 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. 1: https://las.illinois.edu/news/2020-01-29/tracing-history-gender-neutral-pronouns https://las.illinois.edu/news/2020-01-29/tracing-history-gen...
- jablala 4y agoLearning 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!
- abhishekjha 4y agoWhat I miss in English is you don't know if you talking about somebody younger or elder : आप (You, elder) and तुम (You, younger).
- forty 4y agoI'm curious, in which context does it matter? 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)
- jfk13 4y agoAh, 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.
- el-salvador 4y agoI miss some things in English too: - 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).
- sushisource 4y agoI 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.
- hunglee2 4y agoMore 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
- ZainRiz 4y agoUrdu 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"
- hunglee2 4y agohow interesting. the same case in most chinese languages
- el-salvador 4y agoSpanish distinguishes between cousins from your parent's siblings (primos hermanos), and cousins from your parent's cousins (primos).
- samatman 4y agoAs does English, the former are first cousins, the latter second cousins.
- k_sze 4y agoGiven 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.
- canistel 4y agoHindi 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.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoSome languages take this so far that they avoid generic pronouns like "you" entirely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_avoidance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_avoidance
- x3n0ph3n3 4y agoIn Korean, you're also not generally supposed to use people's names, unless it's their title + last name (or last name + first name to disambiguate).
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoWhich 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 4y agosome cultures pay closer attention to family ties than others, and deploy language to communicate these thoughts, as all language is deployed.
- erie 4y agoYes, 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- frogulis 4y agoI 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. Some of these systems are amazingly complex and systematic, like this chart of recursively marriageable groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship#/media/File:Nom-peau-mariage.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship#... If anyone's interested, this paper here covers the topics that were a big focus of her work and the semester: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283297492_Hyponymy_and_the_structure_of_Kuuk_Thaayorre_kinship_2016 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283297492_Hyponymy_...
- WelcomeShorty 4y agoWhat 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). Please proof me wrong.