That’s a specific relationship with its own dedicated name in Chinese
farmor - father's mother
farfar - father's father
faster - father's sister (abbreviated from "far syster")
moster - mother's sistem (abbreviated)
farbror - father's brother
I like to extend the basic set of these to older generations, so instead of "my mormor's father" it'd be "mormorfar". Very practical!
In Iceland, surnames use the fathers firstname and sson for son and dotir for daughter, to highlight the relationship in an otherwise small community. Whether that cultural habit is to reduce the incidence of inbreeding I've yet to find out, but it makes me wonder. History and culture gives away a lot of metadata.
That’s racist. “The only way these people are going to be able to stop fucking their cousins as if they come up with a naming system that makes it extremely clear who is related to who.” There are probably other explanations other than being inbred as to why they do this. Like how some people go by Junior or Senior. Do you think that’s to prevent inbreeding also?
Interestingly the article mentions that this is a problem precicely because of the Icelandic naming scheme:
> Neither patronymic or matronymic, instead each person's father's first name becomes the child's last name. Each new generation has a completely different name to the name of the generation that preceded it. Cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews -- all could have very different names.
My great grandfather Søren Kristian Magnussen was born in 1890, and he got his fathers last name. His father, August Magnussen was born Magnusson in 1842 to a Magnus Andersson near Bullaren in Sweden (ignoring the mothers here only because they had no impact on the last names). August's brother Johan Alfred Magnusson had (at least) three children who were named Johansson / Johansdotter born between 1885-1890. So even that late some children's last names were still derived from their fathers first names.
It makes genealogy both easier and harder - on one hand apart from during and after the transition period you get the fathers first name "for free" (most of the time, except when they complicate things by using the name of a farm instead of a last name), on the other hand it makes searches for the transition period a real mess (as if the poor hand writing of everyone involved in record-keeping isn't bad enough).
Most of my family is in Norway and Sweden, and used pretty much the same method as Iceland, except to throw an extra wrench in, a lot of the time people would either use the name of the farm they were born on in addition or or instead of the name derived from their father. Since that could often include extended family, and different owners over time, there might be a proliferation of people with the same last name as you with no close relationship, while someone with a completely different name might be your first cousin.
My last name only exists because one of my ancestors got tired of the name confusion and renamed his farm (changing one letter) because the local area were full of people with the same last name on farms with prefixes like little/large/upper/lower to separate them all, most of whom are not closely related to us due to purchases (the exact same change has happened two different places in Norway; as a result about 50% of people globally with the same last name as me are relatively closely related to me - the other roughly half we've not found a connection point to, but of course one will exist far enough back).
The same happens in most Slavic ("Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin" is basically "Vladimir son of Vladimir Putin"; a hypothetical sister could have been "Ekaterina Vladimirova Putina", Ekaterina daughter of Vladimir Putin) and some Turkic cultures (Nursultan Abishuly Nazarbayev is the son of Abish Nazarbayev), so the theory that this is related to tight nit communities on a small island seems highly unlikely.
So did/does some cultural naming system highlight a lack of inbreeding knowledge or not when considering when it was introduced?
Not only that, but in some cases depending on their (the uncle and your father) relative age. I'm learning Hindi, so for example paternal uncle older than your father is your taaya (ताया, or taauu ताऊ) but younger than your father is your chaacha (चाचा).
In English, your male siblings are "brothers", and female siblings are "sisters", regardless of age.
In Chinese, we differentiate between younger and elder siblings. Your elder brother is 哥哥, younger brother is 弟弟; elder sister is 姐姐/姊姊, and younger sister is 妹妹.
A quick test in google would suggest that CNLabelContactRelationBiaoMei doesn't introduce too much ambiguity (first result for Biao Mei is still about the correct term), so even without unicode it might be fine.
堂哥 male cousin older than me 堂弟 male cousin younger than me 堂姐 female cousin older than me 堂妹 female cousin younger than me
表哥 male cousin older than me 表弟 male cousin younger than me 表姐 female cousin older than me 表妹 female cousin younger than me
Chinese has distinct words for relatives of the same generation (siblings, cousins) who are older or younger than oneself. Like "big brother" and "little brother" in English, but you always include the big/little part. "Younger" specifies that this cousin is younger than the person whose contacts book this is.
Female - Chinese has separate words for male and female cousins
The rest of the word salad specifies a relationship that is approximated by answering the question "is her (maiden) surname the same as my (maiden) surname?" in the negative — either she is a daugher of one of my mother's siblings, and doesn't share my surname because I have my father's surname, or she is my father's sister's daugher, and thus has her father's surname, which again is not the same as mine.
Anyway, "Kleincousin" and "Großcousin" don't imply the age of the cousin, but a degree of relationship (with regional differences to what is actually meant).
To refer to a younger cousin, I would just say "jüngerer Cousin". "kleiner Cousin" may be possible too (like "kleiner Bruder" for a younger Brother), but it sounds a bit like childs talk and it may not be immediately clear to everyone what is meant.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verwandtschaftsbeziehung#Cousi...