>Wanting to beef up mërèchi for possible use in a reverse relay, I set out
>to fill out the kinship terminology. I realized the first task was to
>choose a kinship system. Next, I changed it up and added (I thought) a
>dimension (ANADEW, as it turns out), and made it more baroque than my
>sources, as is the mërèchi way.
>
>The result is diagrammed in two Word documents (I know, v. lame, is there
>an open-source general diagram-drawing program superior to Word's
AutoShapes?)
>presenting a full set of grandparents' descendants for a male and a female
>"ego" (plus some great-grandparents). The basic kinship system I was
>inspired by was the Iroquois, but with an additional dimension (beyond
>gender, generation and cross-ness) of relative age whenever siblings are
>involved. (I considered also marking relative age between endpoints, but
>decided not to.) I was also keeping in mind that the Dravidian system,
>said to be a version of the Iroquois, permitted uncle-niece marriage as
>a type of cross-cousin marriage, which informed my choices about how to
>represent older branches versus younger branches of the tree.
>
>(Tonight I found a fuller description of actual practice among most
>Dravidian groups said to be using the "Dravidian" system, which indeed
>does use relative age, and takes it a step farther than I had done -
>using both seniority-between-parent-and-their-sibling, which I do use,
>and seniority-between-endpoints, which I didn't, and the system described
>therein looks fully as complex, though for different reasons, as what I
>ended up with; at
http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/fichiers/GOOD_Kinship.pdf
>for the curious.)
>
>I constructed my system along the basic principles that: younger siblings,
>and relatives reached via younger siblings, are generally referred to by
>terms which indicate relative gender but not absolute gender; elder
>siblings, and relatives reached via elder siblings, are generally referred
>to by terms which indicate absolute rather than relative gender, as a
>mark of respect; and marriagable cousins have more specific names (all
>gender-specific) than either parallel or same-gender cousins. Parental-
>child (and grandparental) names indicate same-genderedness where it exists
>and also mark gender, thus creating kinds of children, parents and
>grandparents which can only exist in relationship to one gender or the other.
>
>I'm afraid I don't have time tonight to describe the whole system in
>words, but the charts are at
>
http://www.quandary.org/~langs/merechi/kinship.tomo.doc for the view from
>the male viewpoint, and
>
http://www.quandary.org/~langs/merechi/kinship.tora.doc for the view from
>the female viewpoint.
>
>A few points are not obvious in the chart:
>
>. double-ended arrows connect the main, bolded person's parents to their
> positions among their siblings; each parent is represented twice
>. grandparents refer to grandchildren as children
>. relatives by marriage are referred to by the blood-relative's name or
> title followed by the suffix -dòna for a junior spouse, or -íntat
> for a senior spouse
>. the suffix -nídit on a name or title refers to that person's entire
> descendant tree
>. the suffix -sèbit on a name or title refers to that person's entire
> same-gender descendant tree (plus opposite-gender leaf nodes)
>. the list of marriagable cousins is: cöpíli, úpla, pilúla, súmli, damúl,
> and símpë
>. the list of unmarriagable cousins is: mísë, sasàtë, kanlí, mèlë,
> löpàla, simílë
>
>And that's all for tonight.
>
>tylakèhlpë'fö,
>Amanda