[HN Gopher] Some languages pay closer attention to family ties t...
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Some languages pay closer attention to family ties than others
Author : edward
Score : 24 points
Date : 2022-06-08 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| hargup wrote:
| Hindi distinguishes between your father's younger brother
| (Chacha) and elder brothere (Tau). Grand children have different
| names depending on if they are from the daughter or son. I made
| my mom write down all the relationship names in Hindi, and there
| are some 34 of them https://yobabita.medium.com/family-
| relationship-names-in-hin...
|
| P.S.: Original article is paywalled, couldn't read
| kaesar14 wrote:
| The same thing with Telugu - found this horribly confusing as a
| child. Link to Telugu:
| https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~vemuri/classes/freshman/family.h...
|
| One thing I always thought was interesting was the value placed
| in having names for marital ties - we treat relations through
| marriage with not much specific vocabulary in English, with
| -in-law being inserted for closer relations like brothers and
| sisters but not for cousin or uncle, for instance. I wonder if
| Old English had better terminology for such relations that have
| dropped in the modern version of the language.
| ginko wrote:
| >Spanish, for example, has a term for your spouse's sibling's
| husband
|
| Can't read the full article so I don't know if it's mentioned but
| in German that would be your Schwippschwager.
| jablala wrote:
| Learning Turkish for my SO has caused me a lot of pain. Forget
| the fact that she has ~20 aunties and uncles trying to remember
| their names and "role" is a hell of a job!
| vt85 wrote:
| HKH2 wrote:
| In Mandarin there are so many titles, and even family friends can
| get them.
|
| I'm glad that in English we can just call someone by their first
| name (with a simple title if need be) and ignore all the
| awkwardness of not knowing someone's title when we want to
| address them for the first time.
| vore wrote:
| To make matters worse, due to the influence of the other
| Sinitic languages (Wu, Yue, Min, etc.), Mandarin actually has
| regional variations of a lot of these words as well!
| keybored wrote:
| English is way to formal with its sirs, ma'ams, doctors,
| professors, and so on.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| >... In Mandarin there are so many titles, and even family
| friends can get them.
|
| I also heard that it's customary to mention the titles instead
| of resp. names.
|
| That is instead of saying Aunt Jane, they'd need to say a
| specific title in the father's or mother's hierarchy.
| HKH2 wrote:
| That's definitely the case for relatives of previous
| generations. You never address them by name.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| More than 'close attention' in Chinese languages - every term of
| address is a signifier of your relationship with that person,
| with the rule of thumb being that you can only address people by
| name if they are equal or lower in social hierarchy, which is
| essentially based on age. Anyone who is 'superior' to you in
| hierarchy must be addressed by title, which is contextual to your
| relationship to that person and often times only used in that
| relationship.
|
| i/e my (younger) cousin addresses me as 'second-older-brother-
| cousin'. She is the only one that does, or can
| belkarx wrote:
| Unpaywalled link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220603015344/https://www.econo...)
| ZainRiz wrote:
| Urdu even has words to describe your exact relationship to
| different cousins: - "cousin brother from my father's sister's
| kids" - "cousin sister from my mother's brother's kids" - and
| even "cousin brother from my father's _oldest_ brother 's kids"
|
| There's also a word for "wife's sister's husband", which is "hum
| zulf". But I spent almost a decade thinking the word was "hum
| zulm", which literally translates to "co-victim"
| hunglee2 wrote:
| how interesting. the same case in most chinese languages
| el-salvador wrote:
| Spanish distinguishes between cousins from your parent's
| siblings (primos hermanos), and cousins from your parent's
| cousins (primos).
| samatman wrote:
| As does English, the former are first cousins, the latter
| second cousins.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I think Japanese is more interesting than that; while they are
| pronounced the same, mother's side aunt and uncle and father's
| side aunt and uncle are _written_ differently.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _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"._
|
| I've thought it confusing that English doesn't have separate
| terms for my brother's wife and my wife's sister (both of which
| are simply "sister-in-law"). Why are we content to describe these
| people as people of the same generation who are not blood
| relatives? This doesn't even get into the Spanish example above,
| which refers to two degrees of marriage separation.
| delecti wrote:
| On the other hand, I think it's weird that there's a term for
| it at all. For how often I need to refer to either concept,
| "brother's wife" and "wife's sister" are both easy enough to
| say.
|
| But it doesn't surprise me that we refer to then as people of
| the same generation; it's not much different from "step-
| brother" in that regard.
| [deleted]
| paganel wrote:
| > Why are we content to describe these people as people of the
| same generation who are not blood relatives?
|
| Probably because the inhabitants of Britain decided at a
| certain point do ditch their Roman heritage. Romanian, a
| Romance langauge, is very similar to Spanish, we have _cumnat_
| for _cunado_ , _soacra_ for the Spanish _suegra_ (mother-in-
| law) and _cuscri_ for _consuegros_ , which goes to show that
| the family ties expressed by Romanian and Spanish most
| certainly come from the common ancestor that was Latin, and not
| from the "surrounding" societal norms (so to speak) or
| something like that.
|
| Maybe us (I'm Romanian myself) having a distinct word for
| _cumnat_ might have slightly changed how we view that family
| tie over the centuries, but it was not the distinctiveness of
| that family tie per se that "created" that special term,
| because we inherited that word from the Romans.
| el-salvador wrote:
| > 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".
|
| I learnt something new today. So the English in-laws concept
| includes both one's spouse's sibling's, and sopuse's sibling's
| spouse?
| lmm wrote:
| IMO it doesn't. I would say my sister-in-law's husband.
| forty wrote:
| It's the same in French, and I came to the conclusion that it
| must be for symmetry reasons: you are the brother in law of
| your sister in law (switch/replace genders as appropriate). I
| think it makes sense.
| abhishekjha wrote:
| What I miss in English is you don't know if you talking about
| somebody younger or elder : aap (You, elder) and tum (You,
| younger).
| el-salvador wrote:
| I miss some things in English too:
|
| - Not being able to specify in one word if a friend is a male
| friend or female friend like amigo/amiga in Spanish.
|
| - The words for friend, boyfriend and girlfriend are too
| similar. While in spanish amigo/novio, amiga/novia are
| completely different.
|
| - Not having one word descriptors for someone's ethnicity, as
| those have to be used very carefully or can't be used in
| English ag all. Like "Avisale el chelito que la zarca lo esta
| esperando para ir a la tienda del chino" (common in my dialect
| of Spanish). "Tell the white-person that the light-eyed-person
| is waiting for him to go to the store owned by the asian-
| person" (very unnatural in English).
| keybored wrote:
| Sadly that can't be done, son.
| forty wrote:
| I'm curious, in which context does it matter?
|
| I know that this is a very cultural thing - as an example here
| in France it's completely unimportant, you would simply address
| kids (or at least younger kids) a bit differently than adults,
| but appart from that the age difference does not matter at all
| (and culturally it's important to know whether someone is a kid
| or not, because, to simplify, kids are legally "irresponsible",
| cannot vote, purchase alcohol, etc and some adults must have
| legal authority over them)
| jfk13 wrote:
| Ah, Hindi. That's not strictly about age, though, is it? It's
| as much about relative social status (though age may be one
| factor in that). So you'd potentially say aap to a younger
| person than yourself in order to show proper respect, e.g. if
| they're an important official or similar figure.
| gumby wrote:
| Funny, though I didn't grow up speaking Marathi (it was extremely
| frowned upon where I was born) I needed an extensive set of
| family (and food) words in order to speak with relatives. It's
| quite common to refer to someone by how you are related to them
| (mother's brother's wife: maamii, mami); the problem is when
| someone in a conversation you have to know how _you_ are related
| to the speaker so that when they say "father's sister" (aatyaa,
| Atya) they are referring to the same person.
|
| What makes this interesting is that (as somebody pointed out to
| me years ago) I carried this habit into my main language,
| English. Not that I say anything as specific as "mother's
| brother's wife" -- I just say "my aunt" but apparently I
| frequently refer to people by connection (your sister) rather
| than by their name.
| shaggyfrog wrote:
| There's a great video by NativLang on different kinship systems:
| https://youtu.be/YOi2c2d3_Lk
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Related threads:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712667
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341855
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Some languages, like Swift,
| andrewjl wrote:
| Judging from the CN prefix, that is all Objective-C. Thank
| you global namespacing! Swift doesn't have this issue due to
| compiler-support for mangling.
| hosh wrote:
| Manderin has non-gendered pronouns referring to a person
| (something missing in English), and a wealth of words referring
| to family relations relative to the person speaking. It's rude
| for someone to refer to an older relation by name, and so it's
| always done by the relational words. There are special terms for
| extended relations on the father's side of the family. It is
| particularly rude to refer to a family member by the generic,
| non-gendered pronoun, because that indicates the speaker does not
| have any relation with that person at all.
|
| These words encourages a more collectivist rather than an
| individual mindset with biases based on the person's seniority.
| That can be good and bad. For example, there's less room for
| identity politics in day-to-day speech, and in turn, you're
| reminded in detail of relations and roles. Korean has something
| similar. South Korea had to retrain their airline pilots to speak
| in English during flight operations because those very same
| relational words do not allow for flow of critical information
| and contributed towards crashes.
| mint2 wrote:
| > These words encourages a more collectivist rather than an
| individual mindset with biases based on the person's seniority
|
| I don't follow how very specific relational pronouns leads
| equality. Explain.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| The unempathetic programmer in me says it prevents
| bikeshedding and the subsequent emotionally charged conflict.
|
| (The lefty liberal in me says don't be a cunt to people)
| hosh wrote:
| I don't claim that it leads to equality. That's a problematic
| assertion.
|
| I said that the relational words in Mandarin leads to (and
| enforces) a collectivist rather than than individualist
| mindset. There is less semantics about identity and more
| about relations. Identity is a reference to a self, whereas
| relational words refer to how a self relates to another self.
| The emphasis is on the relation -- and the social
| expectations, responsibilities, and priveledges of that
| relation, and less on the identity of either the speaker or
| the person the speaker refers to.
|
| So for example, I wouldn't say "Bob". I'd say "my da-ge" (big
| older brother). When I use the latter in conversations with
| other people, those people knows I have this relation I can
| lean on. When referring to younger siblings, I might not even
| use their names even if I could do so without being rude. I
| might say to someone else, "my xiao-de", my little brother,
| making an implicit claim that this person is family, under my
| protection. Whether the kid is worthy of such protection,
| whether I personally want to or not, is secondary that there
| is a relation and there are expectations that goes with it.
| mint2 wrote:
| I don't know if I agree, that seems more tribalism than
| collectivism. In comparing Bob, Jane and smith or similar
| nondescript lao baixing names vs distinguishing family/non
| family plus exact hierarchical familiar relation, it
| doesn't seem hierarchical exact relations is more communal.
| Opinions can differ.
| googlryas wrote:
| > non-gendered pronouns referring to a person (something
| missing in English)
|
| "they"? People pushing for "they/them" pronoun acceptance are
| always quick to point out "singular they" (even though the
| usage is quite contextual and limited).
| hosh wrote:
| RMS tried to promote the use of "perse", "per", derived from
| "person". As with anything, accepted usage depends on if it
| becomes viral.
| kodah wrote:
| > Manderin has non-gendered pronouns referring to a person
| (something missing in English)
|
| English actually has a complicated gender neutrality history.
| For instance, it used to be that only women had a specific
| pronoun while what we regard today as male pronouns used to be
| neutral [1]. We also have "they"/"them" which have been
| historically baked into the language for these purposes.
|
| 1: https://las.illinois.edu/news/2020-01-29/tracing-history-
| gen...
| hosh wrote:
| Yeah. I forgot that written Chinese has Ta as the generic
| and Ta as the gendered one specific for women. In Mandarin,
| Ta and Ta are both pronounced the same.
| usrn wrote:
| They/them is only plural. It works ok in writing but IMO it
| sounds _really_ weird to use it in casual conversation. I
| used to agree with the APA style guide that you should just
| use them but lately I 've been having second thoughts.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| this is a common misconception, but it isn't true, and it
| hasn't been true since the days of Shakespeare, who used
| they/them as a singular. Jane Austen did the same thing. I
| don't know who misinformed you on this topic, but I am
| willing to bet it was not a writer of that caliber. I think
| we can safely consider Shakespeare and Austen to be experts
| in the English language.
| samatman wrote:
| This isn't true though, they has used for centuries as an
| indefinite singular pronoun, like "oh someone left their
| umbrella, they probably want that back let's see if there's
| a tag".
|
| It is the case that using it as a definite singular is new,
| and we'll see if that lasts.
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