Model Languages

The newsletter discussing newly imagined words for newly imagined worlds

Volume I, Issue 6 (2/2) -- October/November 1, 1995

Table of contents

• Sidebar: relative terms for relatives
  • Generations
  • Lineage
  • Sex
  • Side of family
    • Maternal/paternal
    • The family's dark side
    • The family's bright side
  • Relative birth order
  • Person
  • Kindeep examples
  • Table of kinship terms
  • Sen:esepera kinship terms

Sidebar: relative terms for relatives

Kinship terms have been widely analyzed across languages, which often make quite different distinctions. We broke English kinship terms down into Generation, Sex and Lineage earlier, but to translate terms from other languages we will need to add additional semantic components.

We will outline KinDEEP (KINship Distinctive Elements, Exhaustive Profile) here, a detailed framework for defining kinship terms from different languages. KinDEEP has semantic components for Generation, Lineage, Sex, Side Of Family, Relative Birth Order and Person.

Generations

The value for Generation is any number, with 0 indicating the base or current generation, negative numbers indicating ancestors of the base generation, and positive numbers indicating descendants.

One of the more unusual kinship terms in the world is maili, from Njamal, an Australian aborigine language. The word maili means "any relative two generations distant", such as a father's father (two generations before) or a daughter's son's wife's sister (two generations after). KinDEEP expresses this as simply {Generation: +2}{Generation: -2}.

Lineage

As described in the main article, Lineage can be either Direct, Colineal or Ablineal.

Sex

Sex is either Male, Female or Corresponding.

The atom Corresponding is necessary to analyze some Hawaiian terms. For instance, the Hawaiian word kaikaina means "younger sibling of the same sex as the referent". So a man's kaikaina would be his younger brother; a woman's kaikaina would be her younger sister.

Side of family

Languages often make distinctions between the sides of a family, such as maternal, paternal, step- and half-. The semantic component of Side of Family can take any of these values: {Maternal}, {Paternal}, {Step}, {Half} and {Honorary}.

• Maternal/paternal
• The family's dark side
• The family's bright side

Maternal/paternal

One difference might be as simple as distinguishing between a mother's brother and a father's brother, as Latin and many other European languages do. Latin has two different words for "uncle" depending on the exact relationship, avunculus for "mother's brother" and patruus for "father's brother". Thus Latin lacks one word to collectively describe what we think of as "uncle" (how did schoolchildren cry "surrender!" we wonder?) or -- for that matter -- "aunt". Like Old French, other Romance languages lost this distinction, adopting the maternal terms to refer to either side of the family; thus, Modern French has oncle and tante, which were adopted into English as uncle and aunt respectively, displacing the Old English tradition of referring to this generation as "father's brother", "mother's sister", etc.

Just as Latin has no single words for either "uncle" or "aunt", Swedish has no single words equivalent to either "grandmother" or "grandfather", but must specify which side of the family the relationship is through. Swedish does this concisely, using far to mean "father", mor to mean "mother", for:

• mormor, "mother's mother, maternal grandmother"
• farmor, "father's mother, paternal grandmother"
• morfar, "mother's father, maternal grandfather"
• farfar, "father's father, paternal grandfather"

Interestingly, however, Swedish does not use mor and far by themselves for "mother" and "father" respectively, using moder and fader for that instead. No sense taking logic to far in a natural language! (I am not aware of any other European language that distinguishes between maternal and paternal grandparents.)

The family's dark side

Besides referring to the maternal or paternal side of a family, it is also possible to refer to other blood distinctions, especially those regarding re-marriage. English uses the prefix step- to refer to relatives related only by re-marriage, not blood, as in the evil stepmother (which is not redundant) and the ungrateful stepdaughter, for instance. English uses the suffix -in-law to refer to relatives related by marriage, as in the evil mother-in-law and the ungrateful daughter-in-law. When all this familial love becomes too much to bear, English uses ex- in front of many or all the other terms, so that you can refer to your ex-husband, your ex-stepdaughter, your ex-mother- in-law, even your ex-great-grandfather-in-law. But you're not likely to hear the terms ex-mother or ex-brother to describe estranged relatives...

English also uses the prefix half- to refer to children who share only one parent (half-brother and half-sister) but the term is not used to refer to other relatives (no *half-mother, *half-grandson).

The family's bright side

Families often have unofficial members, as English recognizes by encouraging the use of Aunt and Uncle for close family friends of the same generation as a child's parents. I have an Uncle Bill and Aunt Jill, close friends of my parents' from their college days, who were the only honorary parentsibs that I had. To support this almost metaphoric use of Aunt and Uncle, KinDEEP uses the value {Honorary} as part of the semantic component of Side Of Family.

Relative birth order

Japanese also makes distinctions of another variety, distinguishing between younger and elder siblings. For instance, ane, "older sister"; ani, "older brother"; oto/to, "younger brother"; imo/to, "younger sister". Of course, these words also have first- and second-person forms.

In total, therefore, Japanese has six words for "brother", with separate words making the following distinctions:

• "older brother"
• "younger brother"
• "my older brother"
• "my younger brother"
• "your older brother"
• "your younger brother"

KinDEEP has the semantic component {Relative Birth Order}, with values for {Older} and {Younger}.

In natural languages, this distinction is almost always used for siblings, but KinDEEP extends it for the common siblings of any generation, making it easy to express terms such as "younger uncle", for instance.

Person

The Japanese are strongly oriented around family and ancestry, and accordingly their language is richer in kinship terms than English. One of the distinctions Japanese makes is that it has separate forms for "my relative" and "your or other's relatives". For instance, mago is "my grandson"; omagosan is "your grandson". Think of this as a combination pronoun/kinship term, with the term specifying either first person ("my") or second person ("your"). All of Japanese' second-person forms end in the -san suffix or a variant of it. The base word may be different, as in haha for "my mother" but oka/san for "your mother" (rather than *hahasan).

Therefore, KinDEEP recognizes the semantic component Person, with values of {First} and {Second}. It would be easy to suggest a third-person form -- e.g., "their mother" -- but I am not aware of any language that makes this distinction.

Kindeep examples

The following table provides a framework to present the kinship terms of many different languages. If you have a term from a language that does not fit, please pass it on!

When you create your own model language, you can decide which components you want to include. A typical minimal profile involves just three components, as in English's use of Generation, Lineage and Sex, though it is easy to imagine a language that does not distinguish between terms based on sex.

KinDEEP (KINship Distinctive Elements, Exhaustive Profile) is actually exhausting, rather than exhaustive! For instance, it fails to have terms that have been enabled by reproductive science: the womb-mother (she carried the child of another in her womb), the egg-donor (she provided the egg that was fertilized and carried by the womb-mother), the caretaker-mother who actually raised the child but was not biologically related, the sperm donor and caretaker-father!

Table of kinship terms

Legend	L.	Language:	D = Danish, E = English, H = Hawaiian, J = Japanese, L = Latin, M = Malay, N = Njamal (Australia), P = Pitjanjatjara (Australia), S = Swedish
	Gen.	Generation
	Ln.	Lineage:	A = Ablineal, C = Colineal, D = Direct
	Sx.	Sex:	F = Female, M = Male, S = Corresponding
	Sid.	Side of Family
	Per.	Person:	1 = First, 2 = Second
	B.	Relative Birth Order:	O = Older, Y = Younger

*English cousin is a relative descended from a common ancestor by two or more divergent steps, so KinDEEP does not offer a perfect translation, sincle it includes uncle and aunt

L	Term, Translation	Gen.	Ln.	Sx.	Sid.	Per.	B.
E	great great grandparent	-4	D
E	great grandparent	-3	D
E	great aunt	-2	A	F
S	mormor, maternal grandmother	-2	D	F	maternal
S	farmor, paternal grandmother	-2	D	F	paternal
E	grandmother	-2	D	F
S	morfar, maternal grandfather	-2	D	M	maternal
S	farfar, paternal grandfather	-2	D	M	paternal
E	grandfather	-2	D	M
E	grandparent	-2	D
L	matertera, maternal aunt	-1	A	F	maternal
P	kurntili, paternal aunt	-1	A	F	paternal
L	amita, paternal aunt	-1	A	F	paternal
E	aunt	-1	A	F
J	haha, my mother	-1	D	F		1
J	okásan, your mother	-1	D	F		2
E	mother	-1	D	F
P	ngunytju, mother or mother's sister	-1	D,A	F	maternal
E	"uncle", man of father's generation	-1	A	M	honorary
P	kamura, maternal uncle	-1	A	M	maternal
L	avunculus, maternal uncle	-1	A	M	maternal
L	patruus, paternal uncle	-1	A	M	paternal
E	uncle	-1	A	M
E	father	-1	D	M
P	mama, father or father's brother	-1	D,A	M	paternal
E	father or uncle	-1	D,A	M
E	parent's sibling	-1	A
E	parent	-1	D
D	kusine, female cousin	0	A	F
E	stepsister	0	C	F	half
E	stepsister	0	C	F	step
J	[N/A], my sister	0	C	F		1
J	[N/A], your sister	0	C	F		2
J	ane, older sister	0	C	F			O
J	imóto, younger sister	0	C	F			Y
E	sister	0	C	F
D	fætter, male cousin	0	A	M
E	stepbrother	0	C	M	half
E	stepbrother	0	C	M	step
J	[N/A], my brother	0	C	M		1
J	[N/A], your brother	0	C	M		2
J	ani, male older brother	0	C	M			O
J	otóto, male younger brother	0	C	M			Y
E	brother	0	C	M
H	kaikaina, younger sibling of my gender	0	C	S			Y
E	cousin, child of aunt or uncle	0	A
E	sibling	0	C
M	[N/A], sibling or cousin	0
E	daughter	1	D	F
E	son	1	D	M
E	cousin, first cousin once removed	1	A
E	offspring	1	D
E	granddaughter	2	D	F
J	mago, my grandson	2	D	M		1
J	omagosan, your grandson	2	D	M		2
E	grandson	2	D	M
E	grandchild	2	D
E	family, parents and siblings	[-1,0]	D,C
E	ancestor	[
E	descendant	[>0]
N	maili, anyone two generations removed	[2,-2]
E	cousin, relative from common ancestor*		A
E	cousin, member of kindred group				honorary
E	cousin, relative by blood or marriage
E	relative
E	kin

Sen:esepera kinship terms

For my model language Sen:esepera, which is designed to fulfill the role of an interlanguage for use by people of all the world's linguistic backgrounds, I chose a maximally expressive way of forming kinship terms. All kinship terms are compounded from roots representing each symantic component and its atoms, as shown in the following table.

Person	Sex	Side	Generation	Order	Lineage
English
excl.	excl.	excl.	incl.	excl.	incl.
my	male	paternal	-3	older	direct
your	female	maternal	-2	younger	ablineal
	corres.	half-	-1		colineal
		step-	0		unspecified
		honorary	1
			2
			3
Sen:esepera
imun	eman	pam	intensin	tempan	pa
tun	fem	fam	inten	im:tempan	ta
	sim	duen	in		sa
		tepim	u		coganta
		belim	dim
			dimin
			diminten

[afo:] before intensin, diminten means "great-"
[afo:] before in, dim means "all" (e.g., "afo:in" means "all ancestors")

Thus an English speaker can talk about his cousin, u:ta in Sen:esepera, if that is the term he is most comfortable with, while a Dutch speaker can talk about her nicht ("female cousin"), fem:u:ta in Sen:esepera, if that is the term she is most comfortable with. The word fem:u:ta will stand out to the English-speaker reading Sen:esepera, who does not habitually make the distinction of sex for cousin, but he will immediately know the meaning of the word.

Sen:esepera	Translation	Generation	Sx	Ln	Side	Pe	R
afo:intensin:pa	great great grandparent	-4		D
intensin:pa	great grandparent	-3		D
fem:inten:ta	great aunt	-2	F	A
fem:fam:inten:pa	maternal grandmother	-2	F	D	mater
fem:pam:inten:pa	paternal grandmother	-2	F	D	pater
fem:inten:pa	grandmother	-2	F	D
eman:fam:inten:pa	maternal grandfather	-2	M	D	mater
eman:pam:inten:pa	paternal grandfather	-2	M	D	pater
eman:inten:pa	grandfather	-2	M	D
inten:pa	grandparent	-2		D
fem:fam:in:ta	maternal aunt	-1	F	A	mater
fem:pam:in:ta	paternal aunt	-1	F	A	pater
fem:pam:in:ta	paternal aunt	-1	F	A	pater
fem:in:ta	aunt	-1	F	A
imun:fem:in:pa	my mother	-1	F	D		1
tun:fem:in:pa	your mother	-1	F	D		2
fem:in:pa	mother	-1	F	D
fem:fam:in:ta:pa	mother or mother's sister	-1	F	D,A	mater
eman:belim:in:ta	man of father's generation	-1	M	A	honor
eman:fam:in:ta	maternal uncle	-1	M	A	mater
eman:fam:in:ta	maternal uncle	-1	M	A	mater
eman:pam:in:ta	paternal uncle	-1	M	A	pater
eman:in:ta	uncle	-1	M	A
eman:in:pa	father	-1	M	D
eman:pam:in:ta:pa	father or father's brother	-1	M	D,A	pater
eman:in:ta:pa	father or uncle	-1	M	D,A
in:ta	parent's sibling	-1		A
in:pa	parent	-1		D
fem:u:ta	female cousin	0	F	A
fem:duen:u:sa	stepsister	0	F	C	half
fem:tepim:u:sa	stepsister	0	F	C	step
imun:fem:u:sa	my sister	0	F	C		1
tun:fem:u:sa	your sister	0	F	C		2
fem:u:tempan:sa	older sister	0	F	C			O
fem:u:im:tempan:sa	younger sister	0	F	C			Y
fem:u:sa	sister	0	F	C
eman:u:ta	male cousin	0	M	A
eman:duen:u:sa	stepbrother	0	M	C	half
eman:tepim:u:sa	stepbrother	0	M	C	step
imun:eman:u:sa	my brother	0	M	C		1
tun:eman:u:sa	your brother	0	M	C		2
eman:u:tempan:sa	male older brother	0	M	C			O
eman:u:im:tempan:sa	male younger brother	0	M	C			Y
eman:u:sa	brother	0	M	C
sim:u:im:tempan:sa	younger sibling of my gender	0	S	C			Y
u:ta	child of aunt or uncle	0		A
u:sa	sibling	0		C
u:coganta	sibling or cousin	0
fem:dim:pa	daughter	1	F	D
eman:dim:pa	son	1	M	D
dim:ta	first cousin once removed	1		A
dim:pa	offspring	1		D
fem:dimin:pa	granddaughter	2	F	D
imun:eman:dimin:pa	my grandson	2	M	D		1
tun:eman:dimin:pa	your grandson	2	M	D		2
eman:dimin:pa	grandson	2	M	D
dimin:pa	grandchild	2		D
in:ta:o:u:sa	parents and siblings	[-1,0]		D,C
afo:in:coganta	ancestor	[
afo:dim:coganta	descendant	[>0]
inten:dimin:coganta	anyone two generations removed	[2,-2]
ta	relative from common ancestor*			A
belim:coganta	member of kindred group or nati				honor
coganta	relative by blood or marriage
coganta	relative
coganta	kin

Last updated: March 1996
Original HTMLizing by Piermaria Maraziti