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If you are a native English speaker and are surprised a relationship label might translate with difficulty into another language/culture, consider: Brother-in-

If 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 ago
I 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 ago
    Agnatic[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 ago
      Oh, "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.
      - astrange 3y ago
        "last name" also being a funny term since it comes first in Chinese. I'm not sure it's used for patronymic countries like Iceland either.
  - imron 3y ago
    In Chinese there is a distinction between cousins whose parents are brothers (堂 tang) and cousins whose parents aren’t brothers (表 biao). There is also a distinction between older and younger siblings, and then also gender. What seems awkward in English is the very simple and concise 表妹 (biao mei) in Chinese.
    - smeej 3y ago
      It has to have been 20-ish years ago now (pre-smartphone/pocket internet), but I was traveling in Europe and my friends and we stayed in a hostel with a young woman from China. We had a terribly hard time explaining the idea of "cousin." Once we did, she explained that she was unfamiliar with the concept because her family (and apparently all the families she knew well) had only had single children for generations. I assumed there had to have been a word for it at some point, and that people were probably using it somewhere, but she seemed quite sincere in telling us she knew no such word.
      - oefrha 3y ago
        The young woman in your anecdote is an extreme outlier. First, her family and all families she knew well only had a single child for generations; if that’s the case for most people, the population would shrink rapidly, so obviously most families aren’t like that. Secondly, to be unfamiliar with the concept at all, she had to be unfamiliar with some household names from cornerstones of Chinese literature, taught in grade school; very unlikely for a literate person. She also had to distance herself from television and the like, which was achievable twenty years ago.
        happysadpanda2 3y ago
        Apologies for not using a better source than wikipedia, but I could believe that the anecdotal woman was not such an outlier, when you take into account that whole "one child policy" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
        3y ago
- mynegation 3y ago
  If you squint hard enough - yes. I do not know if it is Sapir-Whorf, but if I grew up using completely different words for sisters of my spouse, brothers of my spouse, husband of my sister, and wife of my brother, they do not look that similar to me.
  - conductr 3y ago
    But you understand they’re all referring to aunts and uncles of your children
    - yongjik 3y ago
      That's not very convincing. My mother and my mother-in-law are both grandma to my children, but I doubt many languages use the same word for them.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      uncle/aunt is wildcard relation and means little. Actually in Russian for example it is the same word you use to describe a random person whom you may not even have any relation to
      - gampleman 3y ago
        There's a lot of languages where aunt/uncle is just a polite word that children can use to refer to older adults who are not their parents (in some languages there is an upper age limit, where it becomes polite to refer to these as grandma/grandpa).
        kawhah 3y ago
        And some languages where all the different varieties of father's brother's wife have their own distinguishing names, but then there's also a generic term which means 'older person of one gender who usually comes to the house on $HOLIDAY'.
    - Jensson 3y ago
- renewiltord 3y ago
  It's funny. A Tamil friend of mine from a specific group would not differentiate between her 1st cousins and her siblings. So her female cousin was her "sister" and her biological sister was also "sister". Likewise for brother. She was surprised to learn that we don't recognize the similarity of those relationships. I suspect the appearing naturalness of this is all down to whether or not you grew up with it.
  - vrc 3y ago
    I think that's very common in South Asian languages. Same goes for uncles and aunts. You just extend the family outwards and carry relations with as much fidelity as you can. So a lot of "brothers/sisters/uncles/aunts" are children of my aunt's (through marriage) brother, for example. Edit: I bet there is a term/prefix for "direct" relationships in Tamil. In Telugu, for example, everyone is "anna" or "mama" but you can use prefixes like "mena-" i.e. "mena-mama" to imply it's a direct uncle. But you only use that distinction when you directly need to specify the relationship. You'd still call them or refer to them as "mama"
- defrost 3y ago
  Prepared to be surprised, for large numbers of people all with different languages [1] these are very different relationships - the people your sister might marry are potentially an entirely different skin group to the brothers of whomever you might marry [2]. ( This was once way more complicated in stricter days as both Matrilineal and Patrilineal moieties were intertwined across adjacent territorries - leading to a complex system of exogamous out rotation .. the wikipedia pages fail to fully capture a complete picture with all local variations [3] ) [1] https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_highres.jpg https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noongar_kin_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noongar_kin_systems You're correct that most people in Western society see those relationships as similar - I have no idea if that remains true once you start including Indian, south east asian, and other people across the globe.
- wly_cdgr 3y ago
  I don't perceive those relations as similar, although they are related - kinda mirror images of each other. One is the partner of family, the other is family of the partner. In the former case I expect to have the connecting person's (i.e. my sibling's) loyalty if push comes to shove, and in the latter case I expect the brother-in-law to have the connection's (i.e. my spouse's) loyalty.
- adastra22 3y ago
  What similarity? I seriously don’t see it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
SilasX 3y ago
And don’t forget the kink that, in Breaking Bad, Walt uses the term to refer to his spouse’s sibling’s husband.
- gweinberg 3y ago
  Think about it this way: your brother in law is your child's uncle.
  - richardw 3y ago
    …except when the uncle is your brother.
  - bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
    Only if all of your children are with the same spouse.
    - kmac_ 3y ago
      Right now at Apple's HQ: "New labels are required for ex-brother-in-law."
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Most languages don’t have a word as generic as “uncle” in this context.
    - joenot443 3y ago
      I found it neat to learn that Chinese has 5 separate words for what we in English call Uncle. 1. (father’s older brother) 伯父 [bófù] (位, wèi) 2. (father’s younger brother) 叔父 [shūfù] (位, wèi) 3. (father’s sister’s husband) 姑父 [gūfu] (位, wèi) 4. (mother’s brother) 舅父 [jiùfù] (位, wèi) 5. (mother’s sister’s husband) 姨父 [yífu] (位, wèi)
    - vrc 3y ago
      It gets even more complex when there are regional and family differences in the naming schema. For example, my cousins on my moms side and dads sides respectively use different words for some relations, and then they sometimes use an entirely different set of words with their other sides of the family. All in the same language, but based on background, dialect, etc. So my working knowledge of naming schema ends up being very, very large. Thankfully the relations they map to are standardized in the language so it's just word swapping.
jojobas 3y ago
>In many non-English-speaking cultures, that juxtaposition appears bizarre. It only scratches the surface of how something very natural in one culture is bizarre or even abhorrent in another. Promised wives? <F/M>GM? Snokhachestvo? Washing dishes with cow urine? Sure let's just throw some i18n and she'll be right.
irowe 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/2040 https://xkcd.com/2040
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bandyaboot 3y ago

I 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 ago
  Agnatic[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 ago
    Oh, "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.
    - astrange 3y ago
      "last name" also being a funny term since it comes first in Chinese. I'm not sure it's used for patronymic countries like Iceland either.
- imron 3y ago
  In Chinese there is a distinction between cousins whose parents are brothers (堂 tang) and cousins whose parents aren’t brothers (表 biao). There is also a distinction between older and younger siblings, and then also gender. What seems awkward in English is the very simple and concise 表妹 (biao mei) in Chinese.
  - smeej 3y ago
    It has to have been 20-ish years ago now (pre-smartphone/pocket internet), but I was traveling in Europe and my friends and we stayed in a hostel with a young woman from China. We had a terribly hard time explaining the idea of "cousin." Once we did, she explained that she was unfamiliar with the concept because her family (and apparently all the families she knew well) had only had single children for generations. I assumed there had to have been a word for it at some point, and that people were probably using it somewhere, but she seemed quite sincere in telling us she knew no such word.
    - oefrha 3y ago
      The young woman in your anecdote is an extreme outlier. First, her family and all families she knew well only had a single child for generations; if that’s the case for most people, the population would shrink rapidly, so obviously most families aren’t like that. Secondly, to be unfamiliar with the concept at all, she had to be unfamiliar with some household names from cornerstones of Chinese literature, taught in grade school; very unlikely for a literate person. She also had to distance herself from television and the like, which was achievable twenty years ago.
      - happysadpanda2 3y ago
        Apologies for not using a better source than wikipedia, but I could believe that the anecdotal woman was not such an outlier, when you take into account that whole "one child policy" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
        3y ago
mynegation 3y ago
If you squint hard enough - yes. I do not know if it is Sapir-Whorf, but if I grew up using completely different words for sisters of my spouse, brothers of my spouse, husband of my sister, and wife of my brother, they do not look that similar to me.
- conductr 3y ago
  But you understand they’re all referring to aunts and uncles of your children
  - yongjik 3y ago
    That's not very convincing. My mother and my mother-in-law are both grandma to my children, but I doubt many languages use the same word for them.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    uncle/aunt is wildcard relation and means little. Actually in Russian for example it is the same word you use to describe a random person whom you may not even have any relation to
    - gampleman 3y ago
      There's a lot of languages where aunt/uncle is just a polite word that children can use to refer to older adults who are not their parents (in some languages there is an upper age limit, where it becomes polite to refer to these as grandma/grandpa).
      - kawhah 3y ago
        And some languages where all the different varieties of father's brother's wife have their own distinguishing names, but then there's also a generic term which means 'older person of one gender who usually comes to the house on $HOLIDAY'.
  - Jensson 3y ago
renewiltord 3y ago
It's funny. A Tamil friend of mine from a specific group would not differentiate between her 1st cousins and her siblings. So her female cousin was her "sister" and her biological sister was also "sister". Likewise for brother. She was surprised to learn that we don't recognize the similarity of those relationships. I suspect the appearing naturalness of this is all down to whether or not you grew up with it.
- vrc 3y ago
  I think that's very common in South Asian languages. Same goes for uncles and aunts. You just extend the family outwards and carry relations with as much fidelity as you can. So a lot of "brothers/sisters/uncles/aunts" are children of my aunt's (through marriage) brother, for example. Edit: I bet there is a term/prefix for "direct" relationships in Tamil. In Telugu, for example, everyone is "anna" or "mama" but you can use prefixes like "mena-" i.e. "mena-mama" to imply it's a direct uncle. But you only use that distinction when you directly need to specify the relationship. You'd still call them or refer to them as "mama"
defrost 3y ago
Prepared to be surprised, for large numbers of people all with different languages [1] these are very different relationships - the people your sister might marry are potentially an entirely different skin group to the brothers of whomever you might marry [2]. ( This was once way more complicated in stricter days as both Matrilineal and Patrilineal moieties were intertwined across adjacent territorries - leading to a complex system of exogamous out rotation .. the wikipedia pages fail to fully capture a complete picture with all local variations [3] ) [1] https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_highres.jpg https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noongar_kin_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noongar_kin_systems You're correct that most people in Western society see those relationships as similar - I have no idea if that remains true once you start including Indian, south east asian, and other people across the globe.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
I don't perceive those relations as similar, although they are related - kinda mirror images of each other. One is the partner of family, the other is family of the partner. In the former case I expect to have the connecting person's (i.e. my sibling's) loyalty if push comes to shove, and in the latter case I expect the brother-in-law to have the connection's (i.e. my spouse's) loyalty.
adastra22 3y ago
What similarity? I seriously don’t see it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

SilasX 3y ago

And don’t forget the kink that, in Breaking Bad, Walt uses the term to refer to his spouse’s sibling’s husband.

gweinberg 3y ago
Think about it this way: your brother in law is your child's uncle.
- richardw 3y ago
  …except when the uncle is your brother.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
  Only if all of your children are with the same spouse.
  - kmac_ 3y ago
    Right now at Apple's HQ: "New labels are required for ex-brother-in-law."
- adastra22 3y ago
  Most languages don’t have a word as generic as “uncle” in this context.
  - joenot443 3y ago
    I found it neat to learn that Chinese has 5 separate words for what we in English call Uncle. 1. (father’s older brother) 伯父 [bófù] (位, wèi) 2. (father’s younger brother) 叔父 [shūfù] (位, wèi) 3. (father’s sister’s husband) 姑父 [gūfu] (位, wèi) 4. (mother’s brother) 舅父 [jiùfù] (位, wèi) 5. (mother’s sister’s husband) 姨父 [yífu] (位, wèi)
  - vrc 3y ago
    It gets even more complex when there are regional and family differences in the naming schema. For example, my cousins on my moms side and dads sides respectively use different words for some relations, and then they sometimes use an entirely different set of words with their other sides of the family. All in the same language, but based on background, dialect, etc. So my working knowledge of naming schema ends up being very, very large. Thankfully the relations they map to are standardized in the language so it's just word swapping.

jojobas 3y ago

>In many non-English-speaking cultures, that juxtaposition appears bizarre. It only scratches the surface of how something very natural in one culture is bizarre or even abhorrent in another. Promised wives? <F/M>GM? Snokhachestvo? Washing dishes with cow urine? Sure let's just throw some i18n and she'll be right.

irowe 3y ago

https://xkcd.com/2040 https://xkcd.com/2040

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]