stepgrandparents and relational ambiguity

[Joel S. Berson]

At 1/22/2009 07:56 AM, Charles Doyle wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>In Elizabethan English (and other dialects), the
>specifiers "step-," "half-," and "-in-law" can
>disappear, much to the confusion of present-day
>students (as in the deadly riddle told at the
>beginning of Shakespeare's _Pericles_).

And into the 18th century also, where many kinds
of relations -- and I think close friends too --
would be called "brother", "sister", or
"cousin".  (Noted in M. Halsey Thomas's Introduction to Sewall's Diary.)

Joel


>Of course, kinship terminology as it relates to
>conceptions of "family" is a long-standing interest of anthropoligists.
>
>--Charlie
>_____________________________________________________________
>
>---- Original message ----
> >Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:22:08 -0800
> >From: Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM>
> >
> >Brother and sister as well as uncle and aunt are ambiguous in some
> >cultures as you have to indicate younger or older. I think Cantonese,
> >for example, has a number of these. Japanese has the bizarre case
> >where "cousin" is pronounced as "itoko" but is written four different
> >ways depending on whether the cousin is older or younger, male or
> >female.
> >
> >-in-law is one I personally am not exactly clear about. Is my sister's
> >husband's brother my brother-in-law? I tend to think yes, but there
> >seems to be a pragmatic consideration that comes into play, such that
> >if you're telling a story, you might use brother-in-law to get on with
> >the story, but explain it more carefully or use something like
> >"friend" in other contexts. Kissing cousin probably works, though it's
> >not very common.
> >
> >Another sort of ambiguity is "my grandmother," one that implies that
> >you have only one living, though that's not necessarily the case. My
> >friend (instead of a friend of mine) also has this problem.
> >
> >HTH BB
> >
> >On Jan 22, 2009, at 1:10 AM, Victor wrote:
> >
> >> I find the term "stepgrandparents" fascinating not because there is
> >> anything wrong with it, but because it has a built-in ambiguity
> >> similar
> >> to brother-in-law. Is the brother-in-law a brother of the spouse or
> >> the
> >> spouse of a sister? Is a stepgrandmother a mother of a stepparent or a
> >> stepmother of a parent? (or a stepmother of a stepparent? ;-)
> >>
> >> There are 490,000 raw hits for stepgrandmother and more than twice
> >> that
> >> for stepgrandparent.
> >>
> >> In any case, the word came up today because of an Obama story in
> >> NYT. (A
> >> Portrait of Change)
> >>
> >>
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/us/politics/21family.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all>>
>  >
> >>
> >> Very few are wealthy, and some — like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother
> >> who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-
> >> roofed
> >> shack — are quite poor.
> >>
> >>
> >> Turns out that the ambiguity is easily resolved in this particular
> >> case--but not the way a friend expected when I asked.
> >>
> >> <http://www.northjersey.com/news/obama_grandmother.html>
> >>
> >> A Palisades Park family’s unlikely meeting with President-elect Barack
> >> Obama’s step-grandmother in Kenya last month had its roots a year
> >> earlier in a crowded hockey arena in Manchester, N.H.
> >> ...
> >> Sarah Hussein Oyango Obama, who is about 86, was the third wife of
> >> Obama’s grandfather, but the president-elect calls her his
> >> grandmother.
> >> “Mama Sarah,” as she is known, lives in Kogelo, a tiny village in
> >> western Kenya. Her sparse tin-roofed house has no electricity or
> >> running
> >> water.
> >>
> >>
> >> Never mind that NYT seems to imply that "Mama Sarah" got electricity
> >> and
> >> running water in the past month, if not this week. (The Bergen Record
> >> story ran Jan. 14.)
> >>
> >> I don't know if this is of any linguistic interest, but *I* am
> >> interested in other possible cases of similar ambiguity. In fact, I
> >> have
> >> more than a passing interest in typology of such structural
> >> ambiguities.
> >> (E.g., "cousin", "parent" and "spouse" would be trivial examples of a
> >> different type; "brother-in-law" would be of the same type.) Any
> >> ideas?
> >>
> >> VS-)
> >>
> >> PS: Note that these ambiguities are language/culture specific and
> >> notoriously do not translate well (which is a good reason to analyze
> >> this--try to run Google Translate on "she is your cousin" into
> >> Russian,
> >> then ask a native speaker to verify).
>
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