Translating your family tree into another
language should be simple, right? Just pick a family member and look up the
kinship term. So in Sāmoa your sister is your "uso". Unless you are her brother in which case she's
your "tuafafine". And for the Ashanti your parent's nephew is
your cousin, except your father's sister's son, who might also get called "father". Clearly, there's not just one way to talk
about family. But the intriguing thing is, with thousands
of languages around the world, there aren't thousands of kinship systems. In fact, there may only be a handful. Let's start with you. You're generation 0. By your side you have siblings. Let's give you a brother and a sister. One generation up, we meet your parents, mother
and father. They have their own siblings, your aunts and
your uncles. Up one more, and, oh, look... your grandparents! Ok. Back to your uncle and aunt. Their children are down in your generation,
and they are all "cousins" no matter which aunt or uncle on which side of the family. What we just described is the Inuit kinship
system. No, not English, though we do use this system. See, traditionally the world's languages are
grouped into six kinship systems. Languages in this Inuit system treat close
family differently from family to the side of them, their collateral kin. Now imagine if we dropped this lineal-collateral
distinction. The terms for aunt and uncle would become
indistinguishable from the word for parent. And siblings and cousins would use the same
terms for each other. Which is exactly what happens in Hawaiʻian
kinship. It cares about something else, too: are you
a brother or a sister? If you're a sister to your sister or a brother
to your brother, you use one word, kaikuaʻana, but a brother to a sister, or a sister to
a brother, they have their own brother or sister words. That's still not enough though. You also need to respect age. In Hawaiʻian there's one sameness word for
an older sibling and a different sameness word for a younger sibling. The younger brother of a brother or younger
sister of a sister are kaikaina. Phew! Well, just like English has Inuit kinship,
there are other languages that use the Hawai'ian system too. Remember the Sāmoan word "uso", sometimes
shortened to "uce"? That's for sibling sameness, too. This can get confusing. Here, let me make you a chart. Save it and please review it before you ever
try and translate "brother" or "sister" in a Malayo-Polynesian language! Notice how these two systems we've been using
lump terms together. So many distinct people under the same word
"cousin". So many different people getting called auntie
and uncle. What if we broke these apart? What if we gave unique terms to every single
relation from yourself on the tree? Your wish comes true in the Sudanese kinship
system. If you studied Latin, maybe you tried to map
ancient family terms onto your English ones. Or Inuit ones... in English... heh, it's a
strange world. But the Old Romans didn't talk about family
that way. They had distinct terms for each of your various
aunts and uncles and cousins. Your mother's sister is not your father's
sister, after all. This isn't just some ancient system. Today, Chinese kinship terms are at least
as descriptive as this, plus they demand you pay attention to age. Just imagine the piles of basic kinship terms
Mandarin has because of this. I've even read that finding the shortest path
between kin members in your family, answering questions like "what do you call your mother's
uncle?", that gets tricky enough that you're better off using computer algorithms to solve
it. But hey, at the very least, everyone is clearly
labeled. Ok, a simpler one. Start from our terms, but then switch up how
you label your parent's siblings. Your father's brother is also called "father",
and your mother's sister is your "mother", too. It's their opposite sibling that gets the
auntie-uncle status: your father's sister is your aunt, and your mother's brother is
your uncle. Logically, the children of your mother's sister
and your father's brother become your siblings, but your father's sister's children and your
mother's brother's children are your cousins. The result is the Iroquois system, and it
draws a very clear line between parallel cousins and cross cousins right there in the everyday
vocabulary. Why would you want a system like this? Well, you might want it if you culturally
pay attention to cross vs parallel cousins because you consider cross cousins marriageable
partners but you keep your parallel cousins out of it. The Ashanti Kingdom in Ghana have a similar
system. But as the British learned through experience,
there was a small but critical difference. The Ashanti king inherits a royal throne called
the golden stool. British colonizers were eager to groom some
regal allies, so they sent the king's sons away for a good English education. But they were left scratching their heads
when the golden stool skipped right past these, ahem, "princes". See, when your father passes away, the next
in line to take care of things is his sister's son. That's right, on his death, your cousin becomes
your father. When that happens, it's a kind of Crow kinship. You're still deuncling your father's brother
and deaunting your mother's sister just like in Iroquois. But you do something very interesting on your
father's side. Your father's sister is your aunt. Ok. But here's where it gets strange: her daughter
is also your aunt, and her son... her son is your father. It's rare for terms to cut across generations
like this, but in the Crow system aunt and father do. The normal reason given is that Crow kinship
pays attention to maternal lines through the father's sister. If only the British had known. You could do opposite of this, or the mirror
image. Start from Iroquois again. But this time, use the same term for your
mother's brother and for your mother's brother's son, calling both of them your uncle. And so who ends up being your uncle's daughter? The mother's brother uncle, not the cousin
uncle. She is your mother! This is called Omaha kinship, and if we're
going to blame mom's sister for Crow, we'll chalk this one up to patrilineal societies. Earlier on I told you there were traditionally
six kinship systems. So then, we're done! Hold on. Consider this kin system from South India. It seems like just another Iroquois system:
parallel cousins are siblings and cross cousins are cousins. But watch what happens when we zoom out and
take a wider look. There's even more crossness going on. This is Dravidian kinship, a system that's
said to prefer cross cousin marriages. It's complicated if you focus on you. But keep that goal of marrying your cross-cousin
in mind and go up a generation. Think about the cross-cousins your parents
could've ended up marrying. Let's circle all the cross cousins who were
their potential spouses: for your mother... and for your father... If your parents married one of them instead,
their kids would've been your siblings. You can't marry your siblings, so these are
your parallel cousins. The ones your parents couldn't marry would
give you cross cousins, and marriage material for you! That is the opposite of what we'd expect from
an Iroquois system: father's male cousin and mother's female cousin having kids that are
your parallel cousins, while their opposite cousins have kids who are cross cousins to
you. Whew! Well, there you have it: our world's seven
kinship systems! At least, that's the traditional count. But before I let you go, what about these
questions that kept coming up as I spent my nights researching kinship for you? What about systems that are hybrids, don't
quite fit, or are even seemingly untranslatable? Also, why do these systems exist? Where did they come from? Finally, I've been using family trees, but
what if our assumptions are wrong and these terms aren't really about genealogy or ancestry? Now I don't mean to sell you a rug just to
pull it out from under you, but these questions would make a great followup. Which is something you can vote for if you
are my patron! On Patreon you can grab some unique rewards
and stay updated about NativLang, like this time I posted about a kin term explorer I coded for you. If you're a patron, you should definitely
come try it out. Thank you to patrons for voting for this video. And to everyone, until next time, may you
and your family stick around and subscribe for language.
:cabbagethonk:
I do want to hear any of your guys’ languages kinship systems.
Watched this video right before I saw it was posted here and I am... amazed, honestly. It's made me totally rethink how the Wistanians view family. I'll be mulling this over for a few days or weeks.
That is so very interesting!!
And truthfully I never ever once thought about a kinship system. According to that video I tend to gravitate to the Intuit System but in my latest conlanging venture I definitely have to switch it up a little bit because the culture is a little bit different.
Thanks for sharing this video with us!!
It's interesting that although English is my first language, I gravitate more toward the Sudanese kinship system
Sadly, my conculture is too wacky for me to be able to draw a diagram. I tried my best yesterday, but just failed completely. The culture features group-marriage and there are all sorts of rules governing who's married to who and who is whose child etc. I think I'll try to draw a series of diagrams sometime.
For Kythusave:
'~na' : masculine suffix
'~va' : feminine suffix
'ras' : sibling
'cög' : parent
'nüp' : child
'sül' : spouse
'pëho' : one who is family / relative (generic)
The language is aglutinating so distant relatives can be referenced by repeating the words.
'cögnacögna' : fatherfather : grandfather
'rasvasülna' : sisterspouse : brother-in-law
Mayala uses an Inuit kinship system, but each term has a gender, so cousin is not a word, but rather female-cousin and male-cousin are.
Rén-uo uses a Sudanese kinship system. Family through marriage has it's own terms as well. A lot of people in my fictional world call close friends, grandma/grandpa, aunts/uncles, or brother/sister though so it might get confusing. If my mom had a close friend, I would call her my aunt on my mother's side while she would call her, her sister of course. I did this just so I could speak, because this is exactly what my family does. Is my cousin even related to me? Who knows?
The system of my language differentiates generations, and only define direct lineage. Only first cousins are considered family enough to have a word, and it’s the same word as for a sibling.
Parents and aunts/uncles have one word. Siblings have one word. Offspring have one word. To make parent into grandparent, you add a prefix that means more. To make a child a grandchild you add a prefix that means less. If it’s a great grandparent you use the prefix twice. It continues on by generation.