Some languages pay closer attention to family ties than others
economist.com
economist.com
I've thought it confusing that English doesn't have separate terms for my brother's wife and my wife's sister (both of which are simply "sister-in-law"). Why are we content to describe these people as people of the same generation who are not blood relatives? This doesn't even get into the Spanish example above, which refers to two degrees of marriage separation.
But it doesn't surprise me that we refer to then as people of the same generation; it's not much different from "step-brother" in that regard.
I learnt something new today. So the English in-laws concept includes both one's spouse's sibling's, and sopuse's sibling's spouse?
But I could see how some people might feel much closer to their spouse's sibling than to the spouse of that person (especially if the spouse came into the picture much later). But there's no elegant way to refer to these people, and it could be seen as offensive to demote them from "sister-in-law" to "brother-in-law's wife".
Taking things one step further, I don't know anyone who refers to their sibling-in-law's sibling as a brother-in-law/sister-in-law. But I suppose technically one could!
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.
I think that's the whole language in a lot of ways, though, like you just have a larger dictionary in Spanish because you can modify or combine words in ways that avoid you having to say stuff like "my sister in law, like yeah my brother's wife". That's literally how many more syllables you have to say in English just to say what's said in one word in Spanish, the verbosity is just way higher. I think this leads English speakers to perceive Spanish as a 'fast' language (and some dialects certainly are) but I chalk it up to being able to say more with less words. This is also the case in every other language I've learned compared to English (Japanese, German - Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher anyone? ... and now Russian).
[1] https://www.spanishdict.com/answers/229597/soy-casado-o-esto...
Different words for brother's siblings & wife's siblings. Bhra. Bhen. Bhabhi. Saali.
Different words for elder than my dad uncle v/s younger than my dad (& their wives, so total 4 words). Chacha. Chachi. Taaya. Taayi.
Different word for my brother's kids v/s sister's kids (& gender, so total 4 words). Bhateeja. Bhateeji. Bhaanja. Bhaanji.
Different word for my father in law v/s his brother (& their wives, again set of 4 words). Sahura. Sass. Taaya. Taayi.
A set of 4 words for my father's parents v/s my mum's parents. Daada. Daadi. Naana. Naani.
Almost any of the above' friends (same social circle) gets the same word. So same word for my father's brother and brother's friend.
These all might share a but of pronunciation here and there; otherwise all of them are totally independent (one word), & not derived from each other (like something-in-law).
Maamu ka beta for example.
This phrase is somewhat equally translated in all local languages so people don't have to say "my maternal uncles son" which does the same thing but is much easier to explain and convey
Thus I'm not sure why this kind of detail would arise. in-law to a native basically indicates any of "they're not (really) my family", "they're not my problem" or "they poke their nose into my business when they shouldn't", or "I'm not going to share their name with you but I need some way to indicate a relationship". If the precision is needed it can be added later, like everything else in such a generalist (low context) language.
I'm glad that in English we can just call someone by their first name (with a simple title if need be) and ignore all the awkwardness of not knowing someone's title when we want to address them for the first time.
I also heard that it's customary to mention the titles instead of resp. names.
That is instead of saying Aunt Jane, they'd need to say a specific title in the father's or mother's hierarchy.
e.g. for your father's sister, who is the 3rd child, you could say either:
- 三姑 ("father's sister, 3rd in birth order"), or
- 艷姑 ("father's sister, Yan"), if she has the character "艷" in her name.
On the other hand a peculiarity compared to English is the surname has different suffixes for men and women, and for married and unmarried women. Divorced women will often revert back to their pre-married surname, but keep the married suffix.
What makes this interesting is that (as somebody pointed out to me years ago) I carried this habit into my main language, English. Not that I say anything as specific as "mother's brother's wife" -- I just say "my aunt" but apparently I frequently refer to people by connection (your sister) rather than by their name.
These words encourages a more collectivist rather than an individual mindset with biases based on the person's seniority. That can be good and bad. For example, there's less room for identity politics in day-to-day speech, and in turn, you're reminded in detail of relations and roles. Korean has something similar. South Korea had to retrain their airline pilots to speak in English during flight operations because those very same relational words do not allow for flow of critical information and contributed towards crashes.
"they"? People pushing for "they/them" pronoun acceptance are always quick to point out "singular they" (even though the usage is quite contextual and limited).
English actually has a complicated gender neutrality history. For instance, it used to be that only women had a specific pronoun while what we regard today as male pronouns used to be neutral [1]. We also have "they"/"them" which have been historically baked into the language for these purposes.
1: https://las.illinois.edu/news/2020-01-29/tracing-history-gen...
If we're going to be prescriptive about use of 'they' as a definite pronoun we may as well complain about how particular and peculiar swapped meanings in common vernacular.
> English is not a prescriptive language
English is defined by use, and they are the best users of it.
It is the case that using it as a definite singular is new, and we'll see if that lasts.
I don’t follow how very specific relational pronouns leads equality. Explain.
(The lefty liberal in me says don't be a cunt to people)
I said that the relational words in Mandarin leads to (and enforces) a collectivist rather than than individualist mindset. There is less semantics about identity and more about relations. Identity is a reference to a self, whereas relational words refer to how a self relates to another self. The emphasis is on the relation — and the social expectations, responsibilities, and priveledges of that relation, and less on the identity of either the speaker or the person the speaker refers to.
So for example, I wouldn’t say “Bob”. I’d say “my da-ge” (big older brother). When I use the latter in conversations with other people, those people knows I have this relation I can lean on. When referring to younger siblings, I might not even use their names even if I could do so without being rude. I might say to someone else, “my xiao-de”, my little brother, making an implicit claim that this person is family, under my protection. Whether the kid is worthy of such protection, whether I personally want to or not, is secondary that there is a relation and there are expectations that goes with it.
It could well be tribalism, and the way I mean “collectivist” is not exclusive to tribalism.
I’ve observed this as an outsider with my wife of Vietnamese background. Just one example — amazing to western eyes — is that our wedding invitation to her uncle, aunt and two cousins (i.e. one nuclear family) contained not one name. It was (if I translate) “aunt ten, husband-of-aunt ten, older brother two, older brother three”. And the two cousins are younger then her! But because the aunt is older than her mother, the “older” status transfers down the generation. That older status is reflected in the inter-family relationships and perceived obligations.
It is fascinating to see the structure of language being persistently deployed to reinforce the sublimation of self and reinforcement of familial status and responsibility.
That's only when spoken, because 他 and 她 are homophones, no? Otherwise when written it is almost exactly the same as English in how pronouns are gendered with he/she/it.
There's also a word for "wife's sister's husband", which is "hum zulf". But I spent almost a decade thinking the word was "hum zulm", which literally translates to "co-victim"
Can't read the full article so I don't know if it's mentioned but in German that would be your Schwippschwager.
This is quite common even for basic words, eg 日 "sun" vs 火 "fire" both read hi, or 早い "early" vs 速い "fast" both hayai.
The point of it is not to be rude (as it would be from a Western perspective) but to know how 'hierarchically' you are related so that they know how to address you. Took me long enough to understand this.
Some of these systems are amazingly complex and systematic, like this chart of recursively marriageable groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship#...
If anyone's interested, this paper here covers the topics that were a big focus of her work and the semester: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283297492_Hyponymy_...
I know that this is a very cultural thing - as an example here in France it's completely unimportant, you would simply address kids (or at least younger kids) a bit differently than adults, but appart from that the age difference does not matter at all (and culturally it's important to know whether someone is a kid or not, because, to simplify, kids are legally "irresponsible", cannot vote, purchase alcohol, etc and some adults must have legal authority over them)
- Not being able to specify in one word if a friend is a male friend or female friend like amigo/amiga in Spanish.
- The words for friend, boyfriend and girlfriend are too similar. While in spanish amigo/novio, amiga/novia are completely different.
- Not having one word descriptors for someone's ethnicity, as those have to be used very carefully or can't be used in English ag all. Like "Avisale el chelito que la zarca lo está esperando para ir a la tienda del chino" (common in my dialect of Spanish). "Tell the white-person that the light-eyed-person is waiting for him to go to the store owned by the asian-person" (very unnatural in English).
Which, in your example sentence, they really shouldn't be - it's just a convenient way of describing appearance. But, well, turns out the culture didn't go that way.
i/e my (younger) cousin addresses me as 'second-older-brother-cousin'. She is the only one that does, or can
P.S.: Original article is paywalled, couldn't read
One thing I always thought was interesting was the value placed in having names for marital ties - we treat relations through marriage with not much specific vocabulary in English, with -in-law being inserted for closer relations like brothers and sisters but not for cousin or uncle, for instance. I wonder if Old English had better terminology for such relations that have dropped in the modern version of the language.
Please proof me wrong.