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Comment by jes5199 | Hacker News Reader

are there multiple languages that have this exact relationship concept? because if it’s in a single language or family of languages, the idea that it can be translates into something generic seems questionable

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Urdu has even more discretization. Transliterated into latin characters

* 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.

Adding further to the confusion in Urdu speaking areas when the cousin/mothers' relatives becomes your wife?

not just Urdu:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Global_p...

Huh! That's so interesting.

I don't speak Armenian, but I dated an Armenian woman once, and she told me they have words for familial relationships that we didn't really have concepts for in English.

Like what? English already has all the "twice removed" and other definitions that no one actually uses.

Not Armenian, but, e.g., Bulgarian has a distinct name for the relation of two husbands of (not in-law) sisters. In English, that's just one of the "brother in-law" cases.

On the whole, Bulgarian has far more such relationship words than English.

I am fairly sure English doesn't have (or at least does not use) separate everyday words for farmor/farfar (fathers mother / fathers mother) or mormor/morfar (same for mothers parents).

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).

I can't tell if this is serious. I don't even know which language you're using but it is literally no different than mom's mom and dad's mom other than a space.

It is Norwegian. And it is serious.

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?

Things like this can be highly family-specific. A friend of mine (German) says that in his family, his grandmothers are distinguished as "Oma" and "Omi". Which are both generic German words for any grandmother, but in his family, they are more specific. Like names. Another friend, they used "Oma" and "Großmutter" (a third generic word) to distinguish the two.

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 think it's more common to call them Grandma and Grandpa Lastname or Grandma Firstname and Grandpa Firstname. I've also seen it where one set of grandparents are Grandma and Grandpa and the other set is Nana and Papa or Mimi and Pop Pop or whatever set of less formal terms they use for the relations.

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.

"What are you doing this weekend, little Timmy?"

"One is repairing to the country where one will be enjoying the company of one's paternal grandmama and grandpapa."

Repairing?

Retreating?

It's a slightly archaic usage, but it's correct:

repair [1]

verb

repaired; repairing; repairs

intransitive verb

1a: to betake oneself : go

    repaired to the judge's chambers

1b: to come together : rally

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/repair

The space makes the difference between "word exists" and "word doesn't exist".

I would have accepted it if it was something people would actually say, even if it was written like two words or more. Example: sister/brother in law is something that is close enough even if it isn't written in one word like Norwegian svigerinne/svoger.

But as far as I am aware English only uses grandsomething (or variations of it) + further description as needed.

Paternal grandmother, paternal grandfather, maternal grandmother, and maternal grandfather

There is a big difference, though. In English you would usually say grandma/grandpa and rarely qualify by on which side.

In Swedish and Norwegian you always specify because the words for grandparents are inherent specific to whether they are paternal or maternal.

In everyday speech you generally do not try to be this specific, but if you wanted to (e.g. recounting family history to a doctor or talking about the relationship between your parents and granparents) you could use them to be more specific in a clear way.

I agree that almost every use of farfar should be simply translated as grandmother.

Will you be satisfied if your brother or sister were only describable as "sibling"? Would it roll off your tongue?

Similarly in many languages using the wildcard equivalent to mean something more specific is unnatural.

I do not undestand how this relates to my comment... I only said that if you wanted to precisely localize mormor to english you could.

Ok, I thought you were against having capabilities for supporting mormor as a dedicated word in software (like in the topic post)

English speaking people do not use these all that often. They say "grandmother" or "grandfather". They specify which side of family these come from only when they really need it for some reason.

Unlike those other languages we talk about.

The point of the conversation is how people express these relationships in their day-to-day so they can be encoded in software.

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.

At least in Swedish, I don't even think there is a generic word for "grandmother", you literally always in every case specify which one it is.

I am fully aware of what the topic is about. I'm just pointing out that the English language and native English speakers definitely use the concept of mom's mom and dad's mom without the needing "official" words like "momdad" and "dadmom" because the person I responded to said

> 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.

For day-to-day familiar conversation we generally use nicknames for grandparents in the US and that's what is in our contact list.

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.

There is no "grandmother" in Swedish, you just have mormor and farmor. That makes a huge difference with how you have to use the language, you can't say "do you have a grandparent" since there is no word for grandparent, you will have to say "do you have any mom or father parents".

English has "Paternal grandmother" and "Maternal grandmother" for example, it's just not often used and isn't turned into a compound word.

But you wouldn't tell your kid: we are going to visit your paternal grandmother, right?

That is the distinction I tried to make above between academic and everyday language.

English doesn't have any way of distinguishing between my wife's sister, my brother's wife, and my wife's brother's wife. They are all sisters-in-law. But these 3 relationships are very different for many people in practice. My wife's sister grew up with someone I'm very close to and unlike most other relatives I can't usually badmouth her to my wife. My brother's wife is someone who, like my wife, entered as an adult into a family which I and my brother have always been part of and so might feel threatened by our closeness. And my wife's brother's wife is someone who I can bond with over "we both married into this crazy family and are not really like the rest of them".

And then from my kid's point of view, not only are these all 'auntie' but so is my very own sister.

In Swedish our words for many relationships follow a very simple system of composing relationships. A few examples:

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

...

Brorbror.. your brother's brother?

My other brother Darryl

Brorbror and brorbrorbror could be any of the brothers, including yourself.

The same is true in Norwegian, but then they go and ruin it all with "oldemor" = "great grandmother", instead of persisting with e.g. "mormormor".

At least in danish, we have “bedstemor” which behaves likes “oldemor” in being the mother or fathers mom so it’s really that form that is consistent with the system and not the parent-specific forms.

In the midnight hour, she cried ....

Nice.

The mother of the oldemor is called tipoldemor, and after that you just add as many tips as you need (in Danish but probably also in Norwegian).

We use the same in Danish, but also uses:

Faster = fathers sister

Moster = mothers sister

You can also use tante (aunt) about these

A farbror or morbror is often called an onkel (uncle).

That's still in Swedish, covered by the ...

Vietnamese also has it.

It won’t be localized into something generic. It will be localized to a specific (long) string in most cases.

that seems silly

Different Chinese languages/topolects have similarly elaborate names for family relations, but may use different words and differ in details.

In the Tagalog (Filipino) language, we have the following words which are of Hokkien import:

* 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.

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