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27: Words for family relationships: Kinship terms
🕑 Added 2018-12-20 20:18:34 +0000 UTCThere are certain things that human societies, and therefore languages, have in common. We have the same basic inventory of body parts, which affect both the kinds of movements we can make to produce words and the names we have for our meat-selves. We’re all living on a watery ball of rock and fire, orbiting a large ball of gas. And we all arrived on this planet by means of other humans, and form societies to help each other stick around. Sometimes, we even bring into existence further tiny humans.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the special vocabulary that exists across languages for people you’re related to. Kinship terms are a fascinating area of commonality and variation: on the one hand, all languages seem to have ways of distinguishing family (both chosen and biological) from non-family. But on the other hand, there’s a wide degree of variation in the exact relationships that languages have words for, and this provides an interesting window into which relationships a culture thinks of as important.
Languages can split up or lump together kinship relationships by age, generation, gender, clan, marriage, linguistic history, honorific extension, personal choice, and more. We also get into why words like “mama” and “papa” are so similar across languages, the surprisingly recent history of the word “sibling,” and the current rise in offshoots like “nibling” and “pibling.”
For links to everything mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/181276164046/lingthusiasm-episode-27-words-for-family
Comments
Lingthusiasm
It's really difficult! All books should have detailed family trees at the front haha
Lingthusiasm
Great example, thank you! I've also seen people complain that there's no triangular term for in-law-in-law - for example, the spouse of your sibling is your sibling-in-law, and the sibling of your spouse is also your sibling-in-law, but the spouse of your spouse's sibling is your....sibling-in-law-in-law?
As I was listening, I thought of another example of relationship triangulation. The triangles Gretchen and Lauren talked about either included the person you are speaking to "your grandmother" or someone the person you are speaking to would know "I'm Maggie John'sDaughter" at a wedding. There is also an example of triangulation that doesn't include the person you are talking to in any way. People use the phrase "my kids' dad" or "my kids' mom" to triangulate a relationship we don't have a word for (except "baby-daddy/mama" which is slang.) Just wanted to share that thought!
