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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

What is this relationship? And what does "younger" mean here - younger than the contact?

I've seen this explained before; from memory, it's a type of cousin, with specifiers:

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.

I'm guessing this is 表妹.

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.

It would seem reasonable to me to use the latinized form of the Chinese word as part of the identifier instead of the awful descriptive identifier.

think about what you’ve just said

If you’re suggesting the current identifier is already latinised, it’s not, it’s translated.

I've basically just said that, e.g., instead of the identifier EmployeeTheNumberThatIdentifiesATupleInARelation, you should really be using the identifier EmployeePrimaryKey. That is, you usually refer to things using the name of the respective concept, not by describing what the thing's concept is every time you're trying to refer to the thing. It's called "coining a term". Or, in programming, abstraction (as per SICP, that is giving a name to some compound construct so as not to be forced to repeat it endlessly).

It's not specific to one Chinese Language or even just Chinese.

Surely it has a more generic name, then.

I would like you to figure out what that would be and post it here.

I honestly don't know if I would prefer CNLabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter or CNLabelContactRelationBiǎoMèi (is unicode even allowed?). And I probably butchered that romanization and upset half the internet in the process.

If unicode is allowed, you can also use the Chinese characters

Then about 80% of the world wouldn't know how to pronounce it.

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.

Also don’t chinese family relationships distinguish beetween maternal and paternal-side relationships? E.g. a cousin on your father’s side is called / qualified / described differently than a cousin on your mother’s side?

correct, father side is prefixed with 堂 mother side is prefixed with 表

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

As I understand, only children of father's brothers can be prefixed with 堂, because they have the same last name and are traditionally considered to be in the same house. All others, including children of father's sisters, are all prefixed with 表.

Isn't that "Kleincousin" in German? "Younger" could certainly match the "Klein" part. That would be the daughter of your cousins, so there's surely a male variant too.

I'm German and I never heard the term "Kleincousin". According to Wikipedia [0] it seems to be used regionally to refer to 2nd degree cousins (which I would call "Großcousin").

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...

表妹(mother's side) or 堂妹(father's side)

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