Re: Relations

At 12:54 12/04/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Hello there.
>
>So here's my personal pet peeve about English - a lack of useful relational
>terms. I mean, maybe I'm a freak, but I have always made a distinction in
>my head between maternal and paternal grandparents, but to actually refer
>to my poor Nana J as my maternal grandmother is like referring to her as my
>supecalifragilisticexpialidocious, if you know what I mean. It's hard to
>say and doesn't float off the tongue, but I see a real need to distinguish
>the two relations. It annoys me all the time.
>
>So what sort of relational systems have people worked on that they think
>are unusual or interesting? Since there are nonhuman and nonhumanoid
>peoples being discussed on this list, I imagine there must be quite a
>plethora of systems to discuss ...
>
        In my family, I use "mamy" for my father's mother, "papy" for my father's
father, and I used "me'me`re" for my mother's mother (my mother's father
was dead long before I was born).

        For the Sky People, the things are very simple:

        The Sky People's society is divided into 64 ~der, remindings of the 64
mythical first women. ~der are families in the broadest sense, and they are
exogamous and matrilinear. The children are raised commonly by all people
living in the mother's house (which belong to the same ~der, except for the
fathers), so there is no special relation between mother and child.
Moreover, the child does not consider the father's ~der to be part of his
"family", so someone of a ~der will never use family words for a person
from one's father's ~der. The family words are simply:
- ki: brother, sister, sibling, cousin, someone of the same generation and
same ~der.
- m'a: mother, uncle, aunt, someone of the preceding generation and same ~der.
- we: son, daughter, nephew, someone of the next generation and same ~der.

        The only special word is ~bsoj, which refers to the relationship between
the father and the child (it is also the word used by the father to refer
or call his child, and by the child to refer or call its father). The
reason why the word m'a isn't used is that the father never belongs to the
same ~der of his child, but still helps to raise the child, so the relation
is worth noting.

>BB
>*********
>"You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society!!"
>        - Moe, "The Simpsons"
>Everyone thinks I'm psychotic, except for my friends deep inside the earth.
>Only 268 shopping days left before the end of the world.
>James E Johnson, 1920-1999
>
>
                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html