> Why are we content to describe these people as people of the same generation who are not blood relatives? Probably because the inhabitants of Britain decided

> Why are we content to describe these people as people of the same generation who are not blood relatives? Probably because the inhabitants of Britain decided at a certain point do ditch their Roman heritage. Romanian, a Romance langauge, is very similar to Spanish, we have cumnat for cuñado, soacră for the Spanish suegra (mother-in-law) and cuscri for consuegros, which goes to show that the family ties expressed by Romanian and Spanish most certainly come from the common ancestor that was Latin, and not from the "surrounding" societal norms (so to speak) or something like that. Maybe us (I'm Romanian myself) having a distinct word for cumnat might have slightly changed how we view that family tie over the centuries, but it was not the distinctiveness of that family tie per se that "created" that special term, because we inherited that word from the Romans.