LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
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.
On the whole, Bulgarian has far more such relationship words than English.
Sure in academic language there is probably a way to describe it (edit: and the concept is easy to explain) but there is nothing quick that you can use to tell a kid so they immediately know which of the grandparents we are going to visit without naming them or the location they live in somehow?
Even among the words that do exist, like "siblings", I have a feeling that in some dialects or sociolects it isn't used and people say "brothers and sisters" instead. (I'm not sure about this last one but I have worked with a lot of English and American people over the years and it does feel this way).
And I am not saying the concept doesn't exist, only that as far as I am aware there is no usable everyday word for it.
I mean: nobody will tell their kids they are going to visit dads mum and dads dad next week, rather than telling them they are going to visit grandma and granddad "across the country" or something?
So there must certainly be families in the English-speaking world where kids commonly say "dad's dad" and "mom's dad". Even when unlike in Scandinavian languages, it's not the canonical form.
I'm not sure I've met anyone who doesn't have more familiar terms than dad's mom and mom's mom. They're probably out there, but not super common.
"One is repairing to the country where one will be enjoying the company of one's paternal grandmama and grandpapa."
repair [1]
verb
repaired; repairing; repairs
intransitive verb
1a: to betake oneself : go
repaired to the judge's chambers
But as far as I am aware English only uses grandsomething (or variations of it) + further description as needed.
In Swedish and Norwegian you always specify because the words for grandparents are inherent specific to whether they are paternal or maternal.
I agree that almost every use of farfar should be simply translated as grandmother.
Similarly in many languages using the wildcard equivalent to mean something more specific is unnatural.
Unlike those other languages we talk about.
Would your grandparents' contact be saved on your phone as "Mom's mom" or as "grandma"? Probably the second, which is indistinguishable from "grandma" as "Dad's mom".
In Norwegian, people would naturally call these "mormor" and "farmor" and they would expect that relationship to be correctly labeled in their localized app.
> I am fairly sure English doesn't have (or at least does not use) separate everyday words for farmor/farfar.
They then said you would need "academic" language to describe mom's mom and dad's mom. That's why I said I could not tell if they were serious. Anyway, I think you would be surprised if you asked English speakers what they call their grandparents. I personally used memere and grandma to distinguish between my mom's mom and my dad's mom. The point I'm making is that not having specific words for these relationships does not make English speakers unaware of the difference.
There are probably hundreds or thousands of nickname words for grandma based on a variety of cultural backgrounds, family tradition, and mispronunciations by grandchildren.
The language we use really depends on setting. In a more formal setting we might say paternal grandmother/grandparent. Speaking to a friend we might use the nickname, or we might say the ambiguous 'grandma' or we might say 'grandmother on my dad's side' or 'dad's mom'.
It really depends on the situation and familiarity and formality.
That is the distinction I tried to make above between academic and everyday language.
And then from my kid's point of view, not only are these all 'auntie' but so is my very own sister.
Mor = mother
Far = father
Bror = brother
Morfar = mother's father
Farfar = father's father
Farmor = father's mother
Farfar = father's father
Farbror = father's brother
Morbror = mother's brother
...
Faster = fathers sister
Moster = mothers sister
You can also use tante (aunt) about these
A farbror or morbror is often called an onkel (uncle).
* Mother's brother = mamoo
* Mother's sister = khala
* Father's older brother = Taaya
* Father's younger brother = Chacho
* Father's sister = Phupo
Each of these's spouse also has a corresponding word. For example, Father's sister's husband will be Phupa.
Then, their children are identified with a suffix.
Mother's brother's son = Mamoo zaad bhai
Mother's brother's daughter = Mamoo zaad behan
Etc.
* parent-in-law - biyenan * son- or daughter-in-law - manugang
* brother-in-law - bayaw * sister-in-law - hipag
* the spouse of your brother- or sister-in-law - bilas
We also have the following words for siblings which are influenced by Hokkien:
(male first, then female) * elder sibling - kuya / ate (or aya / achi) * second eldest - diko / ditse * third eldest - sanso or sangko / sanse * youngest sibling (male or female) - bunso (or siobe)
I've also heard my grandaunts call my grandfather "siaho" (the eldest sister's husband) but I don't know what's the equivalent word for the eldest brother's wife.
I don't exactly agree. Note that this constant embeds two terms, exactly because this particular kinship term does not distinguish them. In the other word this constant can only reasonably used in the Chinese kinship system, and others will be confused regardless of whether it's translated or not. The reasonable UI should group such labels into some dedicated section like "Extended families (Chinese system)" so that they don't need to be translated literally. Same for other kinship systems, of course.
That’s what databases are for after all. You can’t encode every possible version of a familial relationship as a constant.
Then why not call it CNLabelContactRelationYoungerCousinParentsSiblingsDaughter ?
This bug is about contact cards, and so the relationship is necessarily between you and the contact. So, it's not like you need to translate 表妹 into English, or differentiate it from 表姐 in English, as it's something you have chosen to describe the relationship. If you just think of them as "cousin" or whatever you use in your language, that's fine, just use that label. But, once you've assigned e.g. 表妹 to a contact, you don't need to translate that to English if you change your locale... because you already know what it means, because you chose it in the first place!
Admittedly, there's an issue when you receive a contact from someone else, but then you will probably be changing that field anyway. Unless we are family, you sending me a contact for your aunt is unlikely to also be my aunt, and if it is, well I probably also share that native language with you. I'm sure there are edge cases, like siblings who were separated when very young and the parents moved to different countries, or adopted, or found via DNA testing or whatever. But even in those few contexts, learning about the word or having the person themselves explaining the relationship to you, probably helps overall understanding of the relationship.
In any case, a lot of the Chinese words for the various familial relationships are quite amorphous. I remember being very surprised when a Chinese friend posted some photos on Wechat of her 孙子, literally "son's son". My initial reaction was "She can't be old enough to have a grandson!" then "Wait? She has a son? I thought she was single..." Turns out, she was referring to her brother's son. Lots of people use 哥, 弟弟, 妹妹, 姐姐 (literally older brother, younger brother, younger sister, older sister) to mean their friendship group, although this is probably a result of the impact of the one child policy. 阿姨 and 叔叔 (aunt and uncle) are just respectful terms for people of similar age to your parents, etc. There's literally no point trying to translate these names into their literal English meaning, because it will just further confuse people.
So, then the big problem becomes where these labels come from. Is it a dropdown box where only the options available in your current language are presented? How do you then choose one that's available in a different language if that's what you want to use? Presumably these aren't translated too literally into other languages, as e.g. an English speaker isn't going to want to choose one of 4 options for "cousin", and hopefully would be immediately suspicious of why their phone wants that much information about the nature of their cousin-ness, when it's customary to just use a single word. How then would that get translated back into Chinese? It would be embarrassing at family events if someone saw that the male cousin on my mum's side was labelled as female cousin on my dad's side.
I think it'd be much easier if you could just type what you wanted into this relationship field, maybe with a drop-down or auto-complete for likely options in your language.
Congratulations, you reinvented the exact UI for this that already exists in iOS from first principles.
Use of kinship terms to describe non-kin is clearly not related to the one-child policy given that it’s a language feature of Chinese that occurs across multiple political lines. It also appears in other languages, such as Korean.
Chinese also differentiates kin vs non-kin address. 哥哥 is typically used to describe a blood relation. 哥 and 哥哥 have very different connotations if used to refer to a non-relative.
It's the main one that English speakers are probably exposed to; but even in this thread there are mentions of other languages and cultures where this or similar relationships have specific terms and more generic ones like "cousin" simply don't exist.
Grouping them all under "Chinese system" is... let's say culturally insensitive.
_That_ is a reason enough to not use the term from any specific language as a constant name; let enough to not expose that in the UI to users.
It’s probably the vast majority of people using it though? Simply by virtue of being such a massive country.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_...
E.g. Mother's sister = Mausi
Mother's sister's child = Mauseri/mausera
Father's younger brother's child = chacheri/chachera
And so on.
Although some of these are more obscure and I'm not sure how commonly they are used these days.
Notably, mapping the entire path isn't congruent with the concept in the topic, which encompasses both "Father's sister's daughter, younger than me" and "Mother's sibling's daughter, younger than me" in one phrase.
This isn't the case, any more than the English word 'aunt' embeds four terms (your father's sister, your mother's sister, your father's brother's wife, your mother's brother's wife). Plenty of languages distinguish between all four of these relationships. But the English term refers to what we see as a single concept - an aunt.
Most family words have translation difficulties like this. The concepts are usually more generic, more specific, or in some cases incomparable when moving between cultures. This also applies to many other words - even ones for very prosaic objects. The French have a single word which means "metallic object which has a particular shape in order to be able to turn something matching that shape", and they use additional qualifications to distinguish between a door-opening-shaped-metallic-turner and a bolt-undoing-shaped-metallic-turner.
The localization system seeks to avoid 2 things: that when an English speaker adds 'Mary (relationship: Aunt)' as a contact, they have to be asked "Is Mary actually your fathers-sister-aunt or your mothers-sister-aunt?" (Because that person would find it strange and unncessary.) Secondly that where possible, someone who has access to this information in another locale, doesn't see a low-quality translation, in particular one which makes no sense ("US English Kinship Relation �� Mary"), or which is misleading ("Mary is John's father's brother's wife? But I'm married to John's father's only brother!"). The right way to do this is to record a reasonable representation of the intended meaning in the source locale, and to translate into the destination locale. Since English also happens to be the language used for the code, the value "LabelContactRelationAunt" looks less complicated than this one, but it really isn't.
This can be seen by how it will be translated. In a locale where the English concepts encompasses two words, it might be rendered as "(Father-Aunt) or (Mother-Aunt)". In a locale where there are 4, 8 or more relationships which could be described in English as an aunt, they might use something intentionally less specific like "OlderFemaleRelativeNotAGrandmother" rather than a laundry list of possibilities. In others yet it might make sense to use the literal English word, or a contextualization like "Western 'Aunt'", if that's the easiest way to explain the relationship.
Nothing about this is unique to either English or Chinese.
IIRC correctly, already the Mac UX guidelines in the 80s included non-Latin scripts, right-to-left etc.
Lesson: make no assumptions and be very thoughtful about what seems to be edge cases from your own cultural point of view.
I disagree insofar as you really need the explanatory text in the documentation to be able to parse the constant’s name correctly, especially if you’re not already familiar with that specific relationship category. It would also be helpful for the documentation to point to the Chinese/Vietnamese/etc. terms to provide context. In that light, a shorter constant name would have been appropriate IMO, for developer ergonomics.
Even if you want to include “full” information, CNLabelContactRelationYoungerMaleCousinNotViaFathersBrother would have been shorter, if I understand the relationship correctly. (The fact that I’m not entirely sure here also indicates that more documentation is needed.)
Brother-in-law
It’s my sibling’s husband, OR my spouse’s brother.
In many non-English-speaking cultures, that juxtaposition appears bizarre.
And then specifying "younger" and the gender of the cousin is straightforward enough.
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)”.
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.
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.
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.
I also discussed the indirect/cultural factor where one should learn about this. There are two complementary factors here: if the young woman was rural there was practically no way she never encountered a family with multiple children; if she was urban it was more likely she was educated and thus should at least learn about it from school and/or through literature.
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.
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"
( 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_high...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship
[3] 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.
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)
It really depends how tight knit families are and how families are spread accross the world. I have to take a plane and cross some borders in order to visit my parents or my sibling's and same applies to my partner so there is that.
Which also makes sense - siblings who have good relationships meet up often and once having partners, those partners meet up too.
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.
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.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘Nigerian’, but that sounds to me like a Hawaiian kinship system, which is different to the Eskimo kinship system found in English.
> 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.
My understanding of the kinship system classifications is that they’re focussed on the most basic terms. You can refer to ‘my mother’s father’s sister’s son’ in pretty much any language, but it’s most interesting to see which terms are considered basic (because that in turn reveals ‘how language and culture play into each other’, as you say).
But cool. You do you.
In the distant past, when you met someone new, they asked who you are in relation to your tribe and family.
Now, they ask what you do for the economy as an economic unit.
It’s fun to rebel against the current culture by asking someone who they are instead of what they do.
I know this isn’t a firm rule, but there are many people in my life who I’m certain wouldn’t have a good grasp of how they fit into their family and community beyond fairly superficial platitudes.
Maybe this has been true in the past as well. I wouldn’t know.
No, I think it's more fun to rebel against the older culture of inbred villages and oppressive tradition
Yes thanks, judge me by what I do, not because some and some other people I barely care about
Sometimes it is illuminating to see if you aren’t running into a wall though.
As non-contrarian as it sounds, I'd argue that as someone who came from a small town, having to define yourself by your "tribe" last name is worse, because if it the "wrong" last name, there's nothing you can do about it. You can, within reason, change what you do for a living.
They have often gone hand in hand though, just as for example lawyers will discriminate against you if you aren’t elite educated.
CNLabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaught - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712667 - Sept 2021 (132 comments)
CNLabelContactRelation​YoungerCousin​MothersSiblingsDaughter​OrFathersSistersDaughter - 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 again? Tweaks to HN title escaping since 20341855 are showing up just a bit there...
I’m curious how that ended up the entity name for U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE.
> 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#Whi...
https://blog.tutorabcchinese.com/chinese-learning-tips/famil...
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.
Then for my grandmothers, they were both "granny" but I included their name (first name for paternal, last name for maternal).
It's not an "issue" for parents, exactly, but it is an interesting choice because of how much less trodden a path it is. Would you both go by dad? Would one or both be daddy, dadda, or pop? Would you use first names or diminutives after a certain age?
It got out of fashion though, not really common anymore at least in my circle.
Sometimes it feels like we've found a fence in a field and started tearing it down because, today, we don't want it to be there, but I'm not as confident as I'd like to be that there wasn't some reason the fence was built that we haven't discovered yet. I'm not confident that there is, either. I'm just apprehensive about trying to change something in a few generations that developed over millennia.
Are we definitely more astute than the way the planet and the universe directed human development? Maybe. But also maybe not.
“Dad” (interchangeably either one)
Use different father words as per family preference. These could be variations of the same family word, like dad and daddy or papa and pops, or entirely separate words like dad and papa.
Use the dads’ first names, either with a father word or without. I know some people who call their grandma “Mama <name>” because she acts like a second mother; no reason it couldn’t refer to an actual mother. That happens to be a non-English example, but it could have been in English. Similarly, I know someone who addressed his (unfortunately now-deceased) parents by first name with no parent word, in English, even though he had the conventional pairing of a mother and a father.
Lots of solutions.
Option one: The winner becomes <dad|mom> Prime.
Option two: The loser gets to live with not <dad|mom> for a year. Or runner-up.
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.
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.
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.
Kinship systems are neat.
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.
It’s not father’s side or mother’s side.
Tang 堂 is fathers brothers children. Every other cousin is 表 biao.
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.
Also mad props for thinking of the exact same thing.
It did for me. Spaceballs was one of the movies that I watched over and over as a kid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
To solve both that use case and the ones you have in mind, the API could perhaps be extended with a language-aware "normalization" procedure that maps relationship labels in a way that loses information but produces a more canonical label for that language. And you'd use that API only in those cases where it makes sense.
But then that would lead to a contact being displayed slightly differently in different settings, which may in itself be confusing to users.
At some point you just have to give up and call it good enough.
If you speak Chinese, there is a specific word for this relationship.
Relationship labels should capture the actual labels people routinely use.
Apple does not offer this label to English-speakers, unless you have Chinese as one of your additional languages.
Similarly, if English is not one of your languages, the label for “cousin” will not appear, which is localized in an even more convoluted way in Chinese.
Let's say that a character in book 1 suspects his cousin of committing a murder, and nothing else is revealed about that cousin (let's say it's a side plot) until book 5, where new evidence turns up and he is suddenly found guilty. If you differentiate between male and female cousin, how do you translate book 1 if book 5 hasn't been written yet?
Even better, let's assume the books are finished, the author is dead, but you're translating to a language that differentiates between younger/older cousins / cousins on different sides of the family. You just pick whichever word you like more. Ten years later, Hollywood makes a movie adaptation, and the "male cousin" from your translation is played by none other than Angelina Jollie. Your readers are very confused.
Translation is hard.
Many Asian cultures, including Chinese, have a wider variety of kinship terms than English. The (unwieldy) name of this constant describes one such relationship which doesn't have a direct equivalent in English.
The first 2 letters of the string make it obvious:
"CNLabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter"
"CN"
These labels are often used in Chinese & similar relationship models. It comes from the dual consequence of tightknit multi-generation families & a dense symbol-derived language. In Chinese, you can derive the term for a given relative within 2 characters using this relationship model.
At the top there's a black bar that shows hierarchy of where this object is coming from:
> Documentation / Contacts / Data Objects / CNLabeledValue / CNLabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSibli(...)
In US, separating out "younger sister" is weird, they probably should collapse the list. But in others like Chinese, some of the collapsed relationships have different words.
dziewierz - husband's brother sounds way more cooler than szwagier imo
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1...
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.
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>”.
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
CNLabelContactRelationElderCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contacts/cnlabelco...
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".
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)
Edit: or is it a word or phrase that doesn’t exist in English?
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.
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".
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.
In many cultures you address someone differently depending on whether they are younger or older than you.
> This enum could have been replaced with data model where you set of a bunch of relationship links:
How is that going to look on the user side? Most people just want to label their contact "Mom" and be done with it, they don't want to construct a family tree and say "this person is an older female parent" or maybe even "older elder female parent" if they have two moms.
You might think "well Mom is clearly an exception" but that's a very North America point of view. A lot of cultures would find it weird if you could label someone as 어머니 but not 장모 because they're equally important.
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.
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".
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.
Before you die there is something you should know about us, Lone Star.
What?
I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.
What's that make us?
Absolutely nothing! Which is what you are about to become.It probably isn't necessary for constant names to completely encode their content either.
There has to be a better way.