Re: Brothers-in-law
| From: | John Vertical <johnvertical@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, May 7, 2006, 14:55 |
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>FWIW, the usual Swedish word for both "man" and "husband" is _man_, but
>"woman"
>and "wife" do not similarly collapse.
>Andreas
A similar thing happens in Finnish. While "husband" _can_ be differentiated
as "aviomies" (lit. "marriage-man"), plain "mies" is used more commonly; but
"woman" ("nainen") and "wife" ("vaimo") are separate. IIRC, the latter is
however a Baltic loanword - and given that "married" is "nainut", it seems
that the former also used to cover both meanings.
€/50
John Vertical