Re: Words for relationships that don't have good analogues in English

Tim Smith wrote:

> As you've no doubt gathered by now, this conculture is much more
> sex-positive than our culture, and I want the language to reflect that
> by having a rich vocabulary of sexual relationship terms.  But it's also
> more (for want of a better term) "relationship-positive" in general, and
> I want the language to have a richly nuanced vocabulary for describing
> all kinds of relationships, not just sexual ones.  However,
> vocabulary-building has never been one of my strong points as a
> conlanger.  My usual tendency is to get obsessed with the grammar and
> totally neglect the lexicon, so I end up with a detailed abstract
> skeleton of a language in which I can't really say much of anything. I'm
> trying to avoid that tendency with this project; we'll see.
I could use some of these ideas for the Zireen languages, if I ever get
around to filling in their vocabulary. Zireen similarly have a distinct
lack of negative attitudes concerning sex, and in general they're very
social. They also have many different sorts of relationships of both
sexual and non-sexual kinds -- what we might call romantic or "falling
in love" relationships are not inherently associated with sex. You could
have a romantic relationship with a tree or a river and it wouldn't be
viewed as more than a little eccentric.

But so far all I have is a tiny vocabulary for Zireen sexual
relationships in Yasaro, and these don't go across well in English: ruké
[z`u_R.ki], jáđi [j\a_F.n_di], and thíla [t_di_F.la]. The typical adult
Yasaro speaker of breeding age has one ruké and one jáđi. Both could be
translated "husband" or "wife", and both are long-term stable
relationships. One prototypical Yasaro family includes two pairs of ruké
in a jáđi relationship with each other. I.e.

   M - jáđi - F
   |          |
ruké       ruké
   |          |
   F - jáđi - M

Thíla is a long-term relationship of a more auxiliary nature, and it's
not uncommon to have more than one of them; they often take the place of
a ruké or jáđi in their absence. Of course, many other stable family
arrangements are possible, and there's a whole range of more casual or
temporary relationships, which can get rather complicated, but I haven't
really thought much about them.

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