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Culture | Johnson

Some languages pay closer attention to family ties than others

Spanish, for example, has a term for your spouse's sibling's husband

[20220604_C][20220604_C]
Jun 2nd 2022
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"Merry christmas from the Family", a country song by Robert Earl Keen
released in 1994, tells the tale of a sprawling festive get-together,
replete with champagne punch, carol-singing and turkey. Many
listeners will recognise the chaos the narrator describes; even more
than that, they may identify with his struggle to recall how he is
related to the various guests. "Fred and Rita drove from Harlingen,"
Mr Keen croons. "Can't remember how I'm kin to them."

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That may have something to do with the English language. It is often
joked that anyone around your age is a "cousin", regardless of actual
relation, and anyone older is an "uncle" or "aunt". English is rather
bare in its terms for family members. Other languages pay far more
attention to the details.

Take "brother" and "sister". Societies that value age-order highly
often have different terms for older brother, older sister, younger
brother and younger sister. These are ge, jie, di and mei in Mandarin
(usually doubled in speech, as in didi), or ani, ane, ototo, imoto in
Japanese. Though generic alternatives exist for certain situations
(like the abstract concept of "siblings"), not specifying a specific
person's seniority in these languages would be odd.

Then take marriage relations. English just adds the rather cold
-in-law to refer to a relationship through a spouse. French has the
rather warmer beau- or belle- (belle-mere for mother-in-law,
beau-frere for brother-in-law, and so on), but at least it means
"beautiful" rather than implying a bureaucratic shackle.

Other European languages have distinct words for the many different
relatives by marriage. A Spanish-learner must memorise cunado/cunada,
yerno, nuera, and suegro/suegra for brother-/sister-, son-, daughter-
and father-/mother-in-law (the terms are similar in Portuguese).
Spanish even distinguishes cunado (brother-in-law by blood relation
to your spouse) from concunado, your spouse's sibling's
husband--something like "co-brother-in-law". It also has the term
cunadismo, brother-in-law-ism, or talking about things you know
little about as though you were an authority--the phrase is akin to
"mansplaining" in English.

Things get much more complicated from there. Arabic accounts for
which side of the family the speaker's uncles and aunts come from: an
amm or amma is an uncle or aunt on your father's side, while a khal
or khala is on your mother's. But those who marry into the family do
not marry into those titles. Your amm's wife does not become your
amma, but is called a zawjat al-amm, "uncle's wife", lest you should
forget which of the pair is your father's sibling. The same goes for
cousins, who have no distinct term, but are the son or daughter (ibn
or ibna) of your amm, amma, khal or khala, as the case may be.

Chinese makes many of the same distinctions. But its system is even
more complex, as in many cases it requires the speaker to remember
whether a relative is older or younger than they are, whether
relatives of their parents are older or younger than they, and so
forth. There are many armchair theories about the relationship
between language and culture that do not hold up to scrutiny. The
East Asian languages' focus on seniority, however, is quite plausibly
related to the importance Confucianism places on the virtue of
respecting your elders and forebears.

Finally, it is a curious fact that English lacks a word to describe
the crucial relationship between the parents of a married couple.
Hebrew and Yiddish, though, have mehutanim and machatunim, and
Spanish offers consuegros for this critical relationship.
Anglophones, meanwhile, are forced to say something awkward like "my
son's wife's parents".

The focus that some cultures put on labelling every possible relation
with a distinct term does not mean that those who lack those terms do
not pay heed to familial networks. Every English-speaking family
seems to have at least one armchair genealogist who can tell you that
Henry Ford was a great-great-great uncle or fourth cousin five times
removed. But each family also has members who couldn't care less,
waving a hand and saying "uncle" or "cousin".

All languages permit you to describe relationships in any amount of
detail your listener would like. But those that require highly
specific labels for kinfolk, forcing you to recall the details every
time you speak, surely etch those facts deep in the mind. That makes
an Arabic singer much less likely to croon "can't remember how I'm
kin to them" than an American one.

Read more from Johnson, our columnist on language:
Technology is making it easier to write and learn Chinese (May 21st)
The real problem with dangling participles (May 7th)
On the origin of languages (Apr 22nd)

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition
under the headline "Family matters"

Culture June 4th 2022

  * "Nightcrawling" is a gritty, accomplished debut novel
  * The story of three 19th-century dissidents sent into exile
  * Arthur Russell was an indecisive, brilliant composer
  * Some languages pay closer attention to family ties than others
  * The problems with complex supply chains

A new eraA new era

From the June 4th 2022 edition

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