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Comment by hervature | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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".

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.

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