Family Trees in Other Languages: our world's 7 kinship systems

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no mention of pirahã

:cabbagethonk:

👍︎︎ 31 👤︎︎ u/mareck_ 📅︎︎ Apr 28 2018 🗫︎ replies

I do want to hear any of your guys’ languages kinship systems.

👍︎︎ 16 👤︎︎ u/Killosiphy 📅︎︎ Apr 28 2018 🗫︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 9 👤︎︎ u/upallday_allen 📅︎︎ Apr 28 2018 🗫︎ replies

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!!

👍︎︎ 16 👤︎︎ u/Donnot 📅︎︎ Apr 28 2018 🗫︎ replies

It's interesting that although English is my first language, I gravitate more toward the Sudanese kinship system

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/cilicia_ball 📅︎︎ Apr 28 2018 🗫︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Apr 29 2018 🗫︎ replies

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

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/Seb_Romu 📅︎︎ Apr 29 2018 🗫︎ replies

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?

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Renisnotabird 📅︎︎ Apr 29 2018 🗫︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/thoughtfulbrain 📅︎︎ Apr 29 2018 🗫︎ replies
Captions
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.
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Channel: NativLang
Views: 422,946
Rating: 4.9578652 out of 5
Keywords: kinship, family trees, family tree, family words, kin terms, family terms, kinship terminology, kinship terms, sudanese kinship, hawaiian kinship, dravidian kinship, iroquois kinship, inuit kinship, eskimo kinship, crow kinship, omaha kinship, linguistics, language, animation
Id: YOi2c2d3_Lk
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)
Published: Fri Apr 27 2018
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