I’ve been straining all the resources at my disposal to try and find an English antonym for “avuncular”. I know, it’s a cultural thing in a society mostly based on a patriarchal family unit in which female relationships are deemed less important than male ones, and the Trobriand Islanders probably have about eleven different adjectives to describe what aunts are, but all I want is one: if uncles are avuncular, what are aunts?
Materteral.
It looks as if you’re out of luck. You could try coining one yourself and see if it sticks (amitar? tantish?) but your best bet is probably going to be “auntlike,” “auntly,” or something like that.
Avalanticular. WooooooooooooOOOOOOOOooooooooooo.
Or, alternately, amital. 
Looks like yabob’s “materteral” is the only one we’ve got (even though, strictly, it’s in reference to a maternal aunt. The paternal ones apparently weren’t writing home about.)
My nieces and nephews describe me as “auntastic.”
:mad:
Corresponding to “avuncular” being derived from maternal uncles. The Latin words for the paternal varieties were “patruus” and “amita”. The Maven’s Word of the Day on the subject:
Cool, thanks for that, yabob. But I wonder why it was the maternal rather than paternal forms that were used? Would have thought the father’s side of things held more sway.
From what I remember from Latin class, ‘aunt’ is the word for paternal aunt – paternal aunt in Latin is amita, and supposedly ‘aunt’ comes from letters shifting about.
A synonym for materteral is materterine.
Sorry, yabob – hadn’t seen all of the posts when I answered!
That type of word is called a Collateral Adjective.
Here’s a site with a very good list.
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/dotila/trivia.html
I even sent that webmaster some that he did not have (snow - nival; rain - plluvial, etc) but it seems he has not posted those yet.
Every now and then in GQ, another collateral adjective question arises. I think I’ll notify a moderator about the above site. Also I think there are plenty of sites that have those collective noun lists (crash of rhinocerosis, murder of crows, etc) and perhaps 1 of those should be in the reference section. Which reminds me, didn’t we at one time have a resource section at SDMB for links to other websites? What happened to that? Maybe it’s so long since I used it, I forgot where it was. Oh well, it’s just a thought.
Heh, asinine means “donkey-like.” I never realised that before.
According to this site, “… English kinship terms are less distinctive for paternal kinsmen because, deep in the Germanic past, presumably in the formative stages of the society, a Crow kinship [matrilineal] system prevails.” While your father’s relatives might be important in your life, you belonged to your mother’s “clan.” It was her lineage that determined where you fit in the society - whom you could marry, what work you could do, what your social status was. There’s a trace of this Anglo-Saxonism in Tolkien’s Rohan, where Théoden calls Éomer “sister-son.”
Thanks, SparrowHawk.
Thanks for the responses. “Materteral” doesn’t quite do it for me; it feels too “coined”: come to think of it, “avuncular” is too latinate. If “motherly” and “fatherly” can be adjectives, I figure aunts might as well be “auntly”. I know “uncly” reads like the opposite of “cly”, but if we switch back to the original spelling and pronunciation, “nuncly” should do just fine.