3.1.-Kinship terms.pptVIP

Words and Terms Kinship Terms Kinship Terms Table of 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. 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. Lineage As described, Lineage can be either Direct, Colineal or Ablineal. Sex Sex is either Male, Female or Corresponding. 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 One difference might be as simple as distinguishing between a mothers brother and a fathers brother, as Latin and many other European languages do. Latin has two different words for uncle depending on the exact relationship, avunculus for mothers brother and patruus for fathers 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 fathers brother, mothers sister, etc. The familys 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