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LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
- cultureswitch 3y agoAfter 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()))"
- Apocryphon 3y agoChinese kinship labels for the win https://blog.tutorabcchinese.com/chinese-learning-tips/family-tree-relatives-in-chinese https://blog.tutorabcchinese.com/chinese-learning-tips/famil...
- teruakohatu 3y agoThat 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.
- Svip 3y agoScandinavian 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«).
- tobr 3y ago“Mormorsmor” is a Swedish word. https://svenska.se/saol/?sok=mormorsmor https://svenska.se/saol/?sok=mormorsmor
- hyggetrold 3y agoDanish: after “mormor” there is “oldemor.” After that you put “tip” in front just like “great” in English.
- daneel_w 3y agoThere is gammelfarmor, gammelmorfar etc., but those indeed lose track of what side of the family they are on.
- henrikschroder 3y agoSure 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.
- lainga 3y agoRelated question (not really!) - two dads or moms - who should be called what?
- lynguist 3y agoNot an issue: You already have two grandfathers and two grandmothers, how do you call them?
- lainga 3y agoI'm not sure I follow, I don't want my kids calling me "grandpa"...
- ziofill 3y agoA+ I’m so going to steal this.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoWhile 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.
- smeej 3y agoI 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.
- robofanatic 3y agoEven "Uncle". In english, Mom's brother and Dad's brother both are uncles ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- zarzavat 3y agoAlso mom's sister's husband and dad's sister's husband. You can have a mother-in-law, a brother-in-law, a son-in-law, but there's no such thing as an uncle-in-law.
- retsibsi 3y ago> 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.
- Jiocus 3y agoLike 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.
- munificent 3y ago> 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.
- robofanatic 3y agoIt'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.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y agoThere’s also the phrases “{paternal,maternal} {grand{father,mother},uncle,aunt}”
- kulahan 3y agoThe 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!
- klausa 3y agoAIUI Korean and Farsi (among many others, I'm sure!) also have lots of very specific words for familial relationships.
- washadjeffmad 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_and_cross_cousins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_and_cross_cousins Kinship systems are neat.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- satvikpendem 3y agoThis is the same in many Indian languages too.
- Dylan16807 3y agoWait, 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.
- imron 3y agoThe page is incorrect. It’s not father’s side or mother’s side. Tang 堂 is fathers brothers children. Every other cousin is 表 biao.
- princeb 3y agoseems 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.
- mulmen 3y agoWhy though? Where does this actually get used? 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.
- klausa 3y agoThere 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.
- mulmen 3y agoOk 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?
- saagarjha 3y agoYes.
- klausa 3y agoKinda! If you have a contact with that specific option set, it'd display as >younger cousin (mother's sibling's daughter or father's sister's daughter).
- mercutio2 3y agoNot if Chinese is one of your chosen languages, it won't. EDIT: I see, there were two questions asked, saagarjha answered “yes”, but you’re answering the first question “is this just cousin”. You are correct that it’s not just cousin, sorry for the correction!
- karelpeeters 3y agoWhat value does this label have for English localization?
- klausa 3y ago"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".
- 1propionyl 3y agoIt doesn't. But after all English speakers are only a small (<5%) minority of the world.
- drekipus 3y ago87% of percentages are made up in the spot.
- n2d4 3y agoIt's correct if you read "English speakers" as "native English speakers": https://gurmentor.com/what-is-the-most-spoken-language-in-the-world/ https://gurmentor.com/what-is-the-most-spoken-language-in-th...
- gkbrk 3y agoEnglish is the most commonly spoken language in the world, followed closely by Chinese.
- sdlfij3lkfjasij 3y agoThis 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.
- dang 3y agoRelated: CNLabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaught - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712667 - Sept 2021 (132 comments) CNLabelContactRelation​YoungerCousin​MothersSiblingsDaughter​OrFathersSistersDaughter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341855 - July 2019 (176 comments) Oh no. Am I going to have to figure out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341959 again? Tweaks to HN title escaping since 20341855 are showing up just a bit there...
- chrismorgan 3y ago> ​ I’m curious how that ended up the entity name for U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE.
- thristian 3y agoWikipedia says¹: > 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. ¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_character_property#Whitespace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_character_property#Whi...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- waltbosz 3y agoLabelContactRelationFathersBrothersNephewsCousinsFormerRoommate
- eigenvalue 3y agoSpaceballs!
- vippy 3y agoCNLabelContactRelationAbsolutelyNothingWhichIsWhatYouAreAboutToBecome
- jayzalowitz 3y agoIssue: Needs to designate roomate meeting place, such as college Also mad props for thinking of the exact same thing.
- waltbosz 3y agoDid the title of this post instantly make you think of that line from the movie? It did for me. Spaceballs was one of the movies that I watched over and over as a kid.
- sneed_chucker 3y agoMy personal favorite line from the film: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0jufq5o13Pc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0jufq5o13Pc
- smeej 3y agoI 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- satya71 3y agoEnglish so inefficient when expressing human relationships.
- wizofaus 3y agoAnd 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.
- noblood 3y agoTwo 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"?
- miki123211 3y agoLanguages 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.
- pndy 3y agoThe Old Polish had some pretty cool sounding terms for describing family relations that become forgotten, changed or dropped in favor of other words dziewierz - husband's brother sounds way more cooler than szwagier imo
- notpushkin 3y agoI think we still say that in Russian sometimes! (Although very, very rarely) https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%8C https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1...
- jdthedisciple 3y agoThere is even CNLabelContactRelationElderCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contacts/cnlabelcontactrelationeldercousinmotherssiblingsdaughterorfatherssistersdaughter https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contacts/cnlabelco...
- yegle 3y agohttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blogspot.relativescalc https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blogspot.r... FWIW there are handy calculators for situations like this.
- prosody 3y agoOf 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship_terminology
- mvdtnz 3y agoThis is interesting - thank you!
- deaddodo 3y agoNone of the categories really describe common Anglophonic kinship terminology. Eskimo is probably the closest, but flattens/simplifies it quite a bit.
- bradrn 3y agoYes, English is considered to have an Eskimo kinship system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_kinship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_kinship
- deaddodo 3y agoSure, 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.
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- bhouston 3y agoThis 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: Relationship: - type: parent (up), child (down), sibling (sideways) - gender: male, female, ... 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.
- klausa 3y agoMaking 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".
- bhouston 3y agoI 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.
- secretsatan 3y agoLocalizing, 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.
- mrbadguy 3y agoThe 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 :)
- ubermonkey 3y agoDang. 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.
- philposting 3y agoYes! 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.
- trothamel 3y agoIs it time for CNLabelFathersBrothersNephewsCousinsFormerRoommate? Perhaps as an alias for false?
- jandrese 3y agoDark Helmet: Before you die there is something you should know about us, Lone Star. Lone Starr: What? Dark Helmet: I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate. Lone Starr: What's that make us? Dark Helmet: Absolutely nothing! Which is what you are about to become.
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- BLKNSLVR 3y agoI'm my own grandpa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkiOm-vmpcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkiOm-vmpcY
- secretsatan 3y agoI’ve always been terrible at diagnosing family relationships, what would be the end result in english? ( or any other language ) Edit: or is it a word or phrase that doesn’t exist in English?
- m3kw9 3y agoWhy
- datameta 3y agoI'm also trying to understand the purpose.
- mercutio2 3y agoIf you are a native English speaker and are surprised a relationship label might translate with difficulty into another language/culture, consider: Brother-in-law It’s my sibling’s husband, OR my spouse’s brother. In many non-English-speaking cultures, that juxtaposition appears bizarre.
- bandyaboot 3y agoI would be surprised to learn if most people regardless of language wouldn’t recognize the similarity of those two relationships.
- Dylan16807 3y ago"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.
- mercutio2 3y agoAgnatic[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)”. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnatic_seniority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnatic_seniority [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716275
- Dylan16807 3y agoOh, "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.
- wruza 3y agoSomeone 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.
- mercutio2 3y agoEach language has a collection of preferred relationships. Relationships that are not culturally relevant to you, personally, will not be shown unless you go searching for them. This conflates language and culture, so it’s not a perfect solution.
- h0l0cube 3y agoSeems like they could have used flags to the avoid the combinatorial explosion
- shmerl 3y agoThis looks horrible. Snake notation please!
- henshao 3y agoAs 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.
- hatsunearu 3y agobecause it's like 3 syllables in the language instead of however many words that is.
- ShamelessC 3y agoThis 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).
- mercutio2 3y agoResponding 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716546
- jes5199 3y agoare 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
- oceanghost 3y agoI 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.
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- RedShift1 3y agoIf this exists, there's probably also a LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughterInstanceManagerFactoryInterface somewhere...
- 29athrowaway 3y agoChatGPT gets deeply confused with those kinds of relationships.
- vinay_ys 3y agoIn 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.
- musicale 3y agoI'm convinced that autocompletion is a curse that enables this madness.
- vore 3y agoHow else would you name this? I don’t think you can make it any shorter without making it either incomprehensible or losing critical detail.
- musicale 3y agoUnlike the library designers for Swift, Java, etc., I don't think every identifier needs to be a paragraph. It probably isn't necessary for constant names to completely encode their content either. There has to be a better way.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoSo what is the language that has the same word/phrase for MothersSiblingsDaughter and FathersSistersDaughter (but presumably not FathersBrothersDaughter)?
- oytis 3y agoFor 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?
- yreg 3y agoFree text field is not machine readable, e.g. for Siri.
- oytis 3y agoWhat the machine is going to do with this label though?
- klausa 3y agoIf 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>”.
- oytis 3y agoWhat 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?
- yreg 3y agoIf anything, this label is intended for machine. I know who's my uncle.
- klausa 3y agoAndroid has exactly the same way of specifying relationships (I think it comes from vCard spec?); though their list of named constants is much smaller: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/master/core/java/android/provider/ContactsContract.java#7263 https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
- smukherjee19 3y agoInteresting! 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".
- glandium 3y agoSame with oji (uncle)/oba (aunt): 叔父: uncle (younger than one's parent) 伯父: uncle (older than one's parent) 叔母: aunt (younger than one's parent) 伯母: aunt (older than one's parent)
- smukherjee19 3y agoOh wow, I didn't know that one! Thanks!
- true_religion 3y agoI 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.