#kinship

There are many different words for "cousin" depending on the gender of the cousin, the gender of the speaker, and their relative ages. Here's a little graphic I came up with:

Here's the kinship terminology for the Ancestral language! Ancestral kinship is a modified version of Iroquois kinship, where the same gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents share the same term, while separate gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents have differing terms. Diluvians as a species are pretty sexually monomorphic, and biological sex isn't immediately apparent until a diluvian reaches sexual maturity. And in once you do, whether you have male or female sexual organs is largely irrelevant. Your sex is defined as being either homoecious (having both male and female organs), or monoecious (having either male OR female sexual organs, but able to switch when necessary). In Ancestral culture then, your gender isn't dictated by your sex , but by your parenting role; for Ancestral diluvians, the distinction is "mother" vs. "father" instead of "female" vs. "male". Since both homoecious and monoecious diluvians are capable of both gestation and fertilization, the roles are defined as which diluvian gestates (the mother) and which fertilizes (the father).

I have been avoiding working on the story of Qom while / by organizing the lexicon (reorganizing, really) of Classical Swira … and not finishing that, either. While that goes on, it seems that it doesn’t matter that I prune every single protolanguage etymon that I no longer use, and that is a waste of time for now, at least. So I’m focusing on cleaning up particular semantic domains. This time, it’s the kinship terms.

(Of course, having done so, mewling central beat me to it & made a prettier chart.)

You may remember from a while ago, the kinship terms for the protolanguage.

Swira terms are mostly an update of this. This gives us:

In the traditional anthropological six-type typology of kinship systems, it seems to be somewhere between “Inuit” (because it doesn’t distinguish cousins much) and Sudanese (because it does distinguish different types of uncles). In addition, it distinguishes relative age within generations – both ego’s generation and the parents.

Many kinship systems will merge particular relationships in one term. I considered giving Swira a different set of kinship term mergers – all relatives of one’s own and one’s parent’s generation are referred to by the same term IF they are younger than the parent but older than you. Additionally, all people in ego’s generation, younger than ego, are ‘younger sibling’ regardless of whether they’re a biological sibling or cousin. (I don’t know if any earthly society does so, but why not? It does at least fit one rule of kinship which I do observe, which is that more distinctions are made in older ages / generations than younger ones. However, I did not do this for the chart.)

Many of these have multiple forms. I have shown one form, the “free” form, which is unbound, usually used in a direct address, sometimes in place of a name – and in some cases is found as a generic noun, for example, lara is also a typical word for just ‘old man.’ It is common to extend kinship terms to some people to whom one is not really related. For example, it is polite to address strange old men and women as “grandfather / grandmother,” and the terms without a personal prefix generally mean just “old man / old woman.”These words also have conjugated forms with a personal possessive prefix, which form may differ from the unbound form. For example, muku has the bound form just -mu as in kʷemu ‘my son.’

One thing I wanted to do is to have terms resemble each other in a “family-resemblance” way that is not entirely regular. Many of the words have broad regularities going back to the protolanguage, but altered by sound changes – visible in the o- on parternal relatives and the na- on maternal ones. That said, having all the words be etymologically / morphologically-derived / related isn’t super real. One thing I thing I’ve noticed while looking at kinship terms, is that (like names for sexes and ages of animals), when a language distinguishes numerous different words for different relationships, they’re often different roots, rather than transparently derived from some kind of ‘mother’s side’ / ‘father’s side’ / ‘in-law’ prefix as seen here. But I kind of like it, and don’t see any reason why it CAN’T be.