Words index  Vivian Cook

Relatives

Everybody in the world in a sense has the same number of biological relatives; you can’t escape from your relatives. However different languages talk about these in different ways. English does not make several distinctions that are vital to family relationships in other countries.

For example English does not distinguish between your mother’s family and your father’s so that your father’s father and your mother’s father are both your grandfather; Swedish however calls your mother’s father morfar, your father’s father farfar, your mother’s father morfar and your father’s father farfar. Thai and Hindi also make this distinction. Of course some dialects or individual English families do talk about say their nana and their nan. And of course if we want to be precise we can talk about our maternal grandmother rather than our paternal grandmother but this would not be exactly everyday language.

The same with your aunts and uncles; one word for each in English, a different word for your father’s sister and the mother’s sister, in Swedish faster and moster.

But this is still more complicated by the fact that many languages also recognise seniority by age; so in Thai, your father’s elder sister is your pa, your father’s younger sister or  brother is your are, your father’s elder brother is your lung, your father’s younger is your are as well. All of this covered by aunt and uncle in English (and we haven’t even looked at the words for the mother’s brothers and sisters).