So come up with a word for it and maybe it will catch on.
Personally, I’m bothered that there’s a word for uncle-like, avuncular, but no matching word for aunt-like. Meddler is too mean and materteral is too weird. I’m tempted to use aunticular but I worry it’s too close to particular.
The Waali language of northern Ghana also makes the distinction between older and younger aunts and uncles
kpiema - mother’s older sister
mabile - mother’s younger sister
etc…
and these are sometimes transferred into English as, e.g., senior mother and junior mother.
These age relationships are important in their culture.
I don’t get this aspect at all, for any of the languages that distinguish between older & younger aunts & uncles. Would any of these cultures really treat Uncle Joe differently if he’s dad’s younger brother vs. dad’s older brother? Does Aunt Margaret get less respect if she’s mom’s younger sister than if she’s older than mom?
Yes.
For example, In traditional Bengali culture, you grow up living in the same household as your dad’s brothers.
The older brothers and their wives hold a higher degree of authority over you than the younger brothers and their wives. In the latter case, your relationship can be more casual and intimate.
And your mother’s brothers don’t live with you, so they don’t have to be authoritative at all. You expect to be coddled and indulged by your mother’s brothers and their wives.
Tamil (my in-laws’ first language) is similar. My kids use the Tamil words for their maternal grandparents and uncle, and the English words for my side of the family.
English also doesn’t actually have a name for one’s collective nieces and nephews, although I’ve heard the word “niblings” used.
Another example—not an uncle one—is that in traditional Bengali culture, a man was permitted to have a close relationship with his elder brother’s wife.
Unlike other male-female relationships in traditional society, the boudi-deyor (elder brother’s wife-husband’s younger brother) relationship was not monitored or policed.
In the days of child marriages, indeed, these two people would essentially grow up together and might often be each other’s closest playmates/friends of the opposite sex.
The most common kind of infidelity in Bengali literature takes place in the context of this relationship.
Indeed, in some wealthy families, if the family’s eldest son died young without a male heir or was impotent, his younger brother would be assigned to impregnate the wife.
Finnish has setä for father’s brother and eno for mother’s brother. It has been explained to me that the connotations of these two words are very different: setä is strict and austere; eno is fun and indulgent. The film Mon Oncle is naturally translated as enoni….
The parallel words in Latin are patruus for father’s brother and avunculus for mother’s brother. Patruus is severe; avunculus is, well, avuncular.
Japanese makes a different distinction, but only in writing. An uncle (on either side) older than the respective parent is 伯父, whereas a younger uncle is 叔父. In the spoken language, both are pronounced oji. (Although it is possible to distinguish the two words by using the Sino-Japanese pronunciations: hakufu and shukufu.)
This is obviously true. There’s also an element of randomness involved, though, at least in some cases.
Swedish does the same thing as Mighty_Girl describes upthread for Danish, using morbror/farbror for your mother’s brother or father’s brother, and moster/faster for your mother’s sister or father’s sister, respectively.
However, Norwegian can’t be bothered with that distinction (or stopped bothering at some point), and you just have onkel/tante (uncle/aunt), like in English.
So, does this mean that a Swede treats his maternal/paternal uncles and aunts in a more differentiated way than a Norwegian does, for cultural reasons? No. Or at least I’ve never seen any evidence of that. I think it’s just one of those random things that language does sometimes.
Vietnamese also distinguishes types of uncles and aunts:
bác - father’s older brother
chú - father’s younger brother
cậu - mother’s brother
dượng - husband of mother’s or father’s sister
cô - father’s sister
dì - mother’s sister
bác (or bác gái) - wife of bác (yeah, weird)
thím - wife of chú
mợ - wife of cậu
Well, materteral actually is that word, according to the dictionary … it seems weird only because nobody chooses to use it except when somebody asks “is there a word for aunt-like?”.
An uncle is the brother, brother-in-law or half-brother of one’s parent, so it doesn’t matter if you’re blood or not in terms of who we consider to be an uncle.
As has been said, many families use the term “uncle” to also include close family friends. My uncle Frank was really just my Dad’s best friend and I was into my teens before I even thought about whether he was “really” an uncle or not. It didn’t matter.
Although I can’t provide any details, Australian aboriginal languages typically define several different relationships that are translated as “Aunt”, including people with no blood relation (you can achieve kinship by other means), but typically excluding your mothers sisters. Your mothers sisters typically count as “Mother”, and their children typically count as “brother” and “sister”
“Auntie” is a very common designation for important women in Aus/Aboriginal culture, even among those who have no language other than English, because the relationships are important even when not directly available in English.
Another thing about Swedish (to keep harping on from my earlier post): “Farbror” (father’s brother) and “tant” (non-specific aunt) can also sometimes be used colloquially to refer to any older man or woman, even if you’re not related to them. Oddly enough, “farbror” is kinda-sorta a term of endearment or respect (that nice older man), while “tant” is more a derogative term (that grumpy old lady).
Again, Norwegian doesn’t have any of that. So, again, does this point to a cultural difference between Swedes and Norwegians? Well, no. We don’t treat random older people in our respective countries in a more or less familiar way, as far as I can tell.
Actually, there may be a very tiny soapbox here somewhere that I could get on, concerning the “languages have the kinship terms they need” point. 'Cause this seems like the kind of thing that might make an anthropologist draw all sort of conclusions if he was talking about tiny tribes in the Amazon, instead of Scandinavians. Sure, it looks like Swedes are all hung up on kinship and have lots of complex and specific relationships, while Norwegians don’t. Except that it actually doesn’t mean much at all, in cultural terms. It’s just a matter of idioms and how nitpicky the languages get about this particular thing.
So, I guess that’s two cents (well, two posts) worth of “maybe we shouldn’t read too much into this sort of thing, at least in some cases”, from me. Just a thought, anyway.
This kind of thing makes translating “Uncle Scrooge” into other languages. When there was no back-story as to the nature of the relationship between Scrooge, Donald, and the nephews, languages that had more than one term had to pick one - and later the backstory was filled in so that the term that was used ended up being wrong. I remember reading about this happening in Finnish, but cannot corroborate it.
The need to describe things exists in all cultures, but whether something merits a specific word or expression, or it doesn’t, I think is more linked to how often is that level of precision needed; to the kind of cultural connotations that you won’t find in a bilingual dictionary. Connotations and social relationships are among the things that change with time: many people in my parents’ generation grew up adressing their fathers as Padre and with the formal you; in my generation that would be unthinkable (we’d be more likely to say “my Lord Father” and add a deep bow, and get a “
cut it out” in return). Family relationships change, language changes, sometimes a language keeps words which aren’t “necessary” any more but which at some point were.
I only learned of that word very recently. So I had to look it up. According to wikipedia - “Coined by linguist Samuel E. Martin in 1951[1] from nephew/niece by analogy with sibling.”
I think that would make aunts and uncles parsibs.
In Polish, there’s is (or rather was) distinction between mother’s sibling and father’s sibling.
Mother’s brother = Wuj (or Wujek, a dimunitive form)
Father’s bother = Stryj
Mother’s sister = Ciotka
Father’s sister = Stryjna, or later Stryjenka
There were also specific term for wuj’s and stryj’s wives (wujenka and stryjenka). These days, these distinctions are mostly historical. The second form (father’s siblings) has been virtually abandoned and it’s wuj and ciotka (translated as an uncle and an aunt) only.
Certainly some lexical choices reflect social factors. Respect for elders is implicit in the alternating words for older/younger aunt/uncle. Another useful relationship word in Thai describes the relation between two mothers-in-law. (If your child marries my child, you and I are ดอง.) Such a word has less value in a more mobile society and my understanding is that the term is becoming archaic. (BTW, the word ‘to pickle’ is also [SIZE=“2”]ดอง.)[/SIZE]
However
I agree. The linguistic dogma that each language is its own special snowflake with just the right lexicon and structures for its needs is overstated. This might make an interesting GD thread.
Now that’s a relationship that I’ve felt need of a word for. In my head, I think of them as my out-laws.