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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

I know very little about speaking Turkish but one interesting thing I learned recently is there's a different word for aunt and uncle depending on if it's your mom or dad's side.

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Many languages have more kin terms than English, which is especially poor in this sense. In Turkish, as you comment, we have:

* Aunt (father’s side) - hala

* Aunt (mother’s side) - teyze

* Uncle (father’s side) - amca

* Uncle (mother’s side) - dayi

You use teyze to refer to an unknown older woman and amca to an unknown older men (similar to how “uncle” is used in Mandarin).

With this more explicit vocabulary, interesting things can be expressed succinctly that would be cumbersome in English (see Sapir-Whorf :-), eg boys take after their dayi and girls after their hala or that as a general consensus you like your teyze better than your hala.

We also have terms for older sister (abla) and older brother (abi).

I like to think that has to do with how strong family and 'extended' family ties are, relative to English speaking countries. When you spend soo much time with relatives you need more distinction. Theres even different words for the various forms of 'in-laws', sister-in-law, spouse of sister-in-law, etc.

Theres a lot of "onto" mapping, things converging when translated, in both directions.

Conversely as a counterexample, the turkish word kalmak, which is to stay, is used broadly in many instances where in English the most correct translation would use verbs such as "to remain", "to be left", in addition to the most straightforward "to stay".

I think that might be quite common. In Swedish we have morbror/farbror (literally mother-brother/father-brother) and moster/faster (mother's sister/father's sister). It's similar for grandparents.

Turkish also has distinct words for grandmothers that works in a similar way. Father is baba, mother is anne and for grandmothers we have "babaanne" "anneanne" (generally pronounced & shortened as "babane" and "anane")

But interestingly no distinct words for grandfathers, both grandfathers are called "dede" (so no "babababa" or "annebaba")

In Chinese the terms will also distinguish whether the brother/sister is older or younger than your parent is.

Bengali does that too and even allows for age based relative positioning by using a "prefix" + "relationship_name":

    - Father's side:
        Uncle:
            Older than father (age_position_prefix + Jethu):
                1. Eldest:    Boro Jethu
                2. After him: Mejo Jethu
                3. After him: Sejo Jethu
                4. After him: Chhoto Jethu
            Younger than father (age_position_prefix + Kaaku):
                5. Eldest:    Boro Kaaku
                6. After him: Mejo Kaaku
                7. After him: Sejo Kaaku
                8. After him: Chhoto Kaaku
        Aunt:
            Same age_position_prefix as above but common suffix: Pishi

    - Mother's side:
        Uncle:
            Same age_position_prefix as that on the father's side but common suffix: Maama
        Aunt:
            Same age_position_prefix as that on the father's side but common suffix: Maashi

     Boro means eldest
     Mejo means middle
     Sejo means younger than the middle
     Chhoto means youngest

So men on the father's side have more dedicated words than others.

There is even a dedicated word in Turkish to describe the relationship between the husbands of sisters :)

Bengali has it too: Bhairabhai (Bhai = brother so the Bhaira prefix qualifies the brotherly nature of the relationship)

Slavic languages do that too

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