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.
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