Paucity of words for relationships

It's true. English does not really have a very complete kinship system. But that's culture, not language. We can describe any relationship we need to; but we haven't burdened ourselves with special words for distant relations.

You have noticed a very peculiar aspect of English vocabulary. As rich as it is in comparison to many other languages, due to its almost creole history, it really is impoverished in comparison to other languages in kinship terms.

But 'why' is always a difficult question, especially when mixed with cultural questions. There are the difficulties with Sapir-Whorf type explanations: both language restricting thought on one hand and the number of Eskimo words for snow on the other.

Does the lack of kinship terms reflect the cultural lack of warmth and caring for relatives among English speakers, that is not caring leads to the loss of the words (which etymologically do exist in the ancestor languages), or did the arbitrary lack of kinship terms contribute to the crumbling of English family values?

Any direction sounds much too tendentious, too judgmental, and requires too much unjustified and biased assumptions to choose.

The comparative lack of kinship terms does ask for an explanation but one backed up by linguistic and anthropological and comparative research. The only source that comes to mind is Levi-Strauss's 'The Elementary Structures of Kinship.' (primarily anthropological but as a by product a number of examples of kinship term systems.

English isn't alone in having relatively few kinship terms. Some other European languages have only a few extra (French, German) and some languages really only have names for their clan and generation (anybody of one's biological parents' generation might be called something like 'uncle' or 'aunt', even one's birth parents).

Having no definite answer to your question, I can only say beware of making cultural inferences based on restrictions to languages. Some languages have grammatical gender and others don't, but that doesn't mean the ones without can't recognize the sex of other people.

I find no plausibility in the argument that there's some cross-language principle that different status and reverence calls for different addresses. Absent any evidence or argument why this should be a cross-language principle, it may just be that this is so in Hindi but not in English.

It is surely true that a culture's mores and environment shape its language. To take a trivial example, I wouldn't be surprised if a society that had never seen an ocean and was not in contact with any other society that had would have no word for "ocean". But how far to go with this is highly debateable.

So sure, in English my father's brother and my mother's brother are both called my "uncle". My sister's husband and my wife's brother are both called my "brother-in-law". Etc. Does this lack of special words mean that we care less about family than cultures that have different words for each? Or conversely, I suppose, that we are less stratified and see many such relationships as socially equivalent? It's an interesting speculation, but without further evidence I wouldn't leap to conclusions. After all, if I want to distinguish my father's brother from my mother's brother, I can say "my father's brother" and "my mother's brother". It's not like we're unfamiliar with the concept.

There are theories that language shapes one's thinking. Like in the classic novel "1984", there's a discussion of how a tyranical government limited people's thinking by controlling the language, for example, defining the word "free" to mean only the absence of something, as in "this lawn is free of weeds", so that the idea of political freedom would be "unthinkable". An interesting idea, but would it actually work that way? After all, people throughout history have invented words to express a new idea. Like, when Demosthenes came up with the idea of an atom, that was apparently a new idea that no one had ever thought of before, so there where no words for it in the language. So he invented one, "atom". (If it wasn't Demosthenes who invented the word, feel free to correct me.) Did the lack of an existing word for the idea make it more difficult to think of the concept? Obviously it didn't stop him. Maybe it meant that it took a particularly creative person to think of it, that other geniuses were blocked by lack of a word. Such a thing is very hard to prove one way or the other. Especially given that it's easily proveable that it's not an absolute, we're left trying to prove whether it has any effect, and if so, how much.

** Further thought 6 years later **

I just got an upvote on this which brought this post back to my attention, and re-reading it I had an additional thought.

How do we name things? In this context I mean, when there are several similar things in the world, do we give each one a distinct name, or do we have a general word for the category as a whole and then use adjectives to specify which we mean.

For example, in English we have many words for different types of motor vehicle: car, truck, motorcycle, etc. People rarely say "motor vehicle", it's one of those words people resort to when they're struggling to find a general word for the category. More often we say "cars and trucks".

On the other hand, we have the general term "telephone", and when you want to be more specific you have to say "cell phone" or "wall phone" (or occasionally some other specialized kind of phone, "satellite phone" or whatever).

Using a general term with adjectives is more flexible. It makes it easy to extend the class and for people to recognize that you're talking about a member of the class even if they don't recognize the specific example. Like if you told me you had a "fwacbar phone", I wouldn't know exactly what that is but I'd at least instantly understand that it was some kind of phone.

Having specific words for each example can make language more concise. If we had to give a long description every time we wanted to refer to something, that could get very cumbersome. Like in the family member example, "my father's brother" isn't long enough to be tedious or confusing. But if you start saying, "my father's mother's sister's son's daughter", well that's just getting impractical.

But having specific words for every instance can make a lot of words to remember, which also can be cumbersome. I suppose if you use them every day you just get used to them. But in English we have many terms for relationships that most English speakers find confusing and difficult to remember exactly what they mean. Who, exactly, is my "second cousin twice removed"? Personally I don't remember and I know many other English speakers don't either.

I read in an article about Chinese kinship terms that implied the following two reasons for the abundance of specific terms:

1. Traditionally people prefer living with or near their families and thus family members encounter each other frequently (possibly even on a daily basis).

2. A distinction is made between consanguineal and affinal relations, which increases the number of terms.

Perhaps these reasons apply to Hindi-speakers in India as well?

I can't say whether the above really holds true and whether all societies that meet the above two criteria also possess a large collection of specific kinship terms but perhaps they could go some way in explaining the relative lack of specific terms in the English language.

According to Wiktionary's entry for uncle, there were distinct terms for maternal and paternal uncles as recently as Middle English. This is certainly consistent with the hypothesis that some cultural change in the early modern era made English speakers less concerned with concise, one-word expressions for specific relationships.

I think the reason for the paucity or abundance of kinship terms in a language is related to the family system that has historically prevailed in places where the language is spoken. In particular, Englishmen and Western Europeans in general have at least since the late Middle Ages tended towards family systems where the nuclear family (husband+wife+children) is the organizing unit of society. In such family systems, more distant kin (say, uncles and aunts and their children) are not necessarily socially or in economic terms more close to a given nuclear family than are unrelated neighbors, business partners, friends, etc. When there's not necessarily that much social interaction between more distant relatives, there's little need for intricate kinship terms.

In contrast, many other societies, such as those of South Asia, have traditionally been organized around the extended family both socially (e.g., marriages are often between kin) and financially, giving rise to lots of kinship terms so that each person's status within the extended family can be easily discerned.

Emmanuel Todd's book "Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems" presents a detailed theory of relations between family systems and social and political ideologies around the world.

Addendum: a generative list of standard English kinship terms

Single words:

mother, father, sister, brother, sibling, husband, wife, spouse, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, niece, nephew, cousin

Note: sibling, spouse, cousin don't have gender. All others do.

An Oxford Words blog post provides some archaic and obscure terms like aiel or nift, but it is not advisable to use these except in specialist usage, as among cultural anthropologists.

Affixes:

grand-, great-, -in-law, step-, half-

Note: - great can be used as many times as necessary, grand only once (thus, great-grandauntor great-great-aunt and never grand-grandaunt). - none of these terms gives the gender of the intermediate relation. e.g. A sister-in-law could be your brother's wife or could be your spouse's sister; a half-brother might share either a mother or a father with you.

Phrases:

nth cousin x times removed

Explained entirely at Rule for naming distant relatives

That's it. There is no maternal vs paternal aunt/uncle, no first, second third son or daughter, no non-gendered aunt/uncle. If it ain't here or ain't derivable from here, it ain't English.

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Public domain chart by Matt Leidholm: