[RNLD] Word request

[Claire Bowern]

Hi Rozenn, 
Yes, terms like this are quite common across the world. They are called 'bereavement terms' in the literature. I just did a quick search for "bereavement terms" on both google and google scholar and found a bunch of hits (adding "linguistics" to avoid the social work hits that come up if the terms are searched for without it).
Claire


On Wednesday, June 12, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Rozenn Milin wrote:

> Hello everybody,
>  
> A friend of mine, in France, lost one of his children a few years ago. 
>  
> He then noticed that in most languages we know, there are words to name a person who lost their wife or husband (widow in English), and a child who lost his parents (orphan), but there is no word to name a person who lost their child...
>  
> This appeared unfortunate to him and he proceeded to try to convince the French Academy to create such a word. The Academy is OK with the idea, but they first asked him whether such a word exists in other languages.
>  
> So I thought I would send an email to the RNLD list, since it reaches a bunch of linguists who have studied a whole lot of languages... If any of you happens to have heard of such a word in any language, would you please get back to me ? And if you haven't, please, send the word out !
>  
> Thanks !
>  
> Rozenn
> 
> 
> 


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