[Lexicog] Words for "cousin"

[Benjamin Barrett]

I don't know the answer to this, but probably a more common way to 
classify cousins than your examples is whether the parents of the two 
cousins are of the same sex or not.

That is, cultures commonly group (1) father-brother-children & 
mother-sister-children as opposed to (2) father-sister-children & 
mother-brother-children. The former are called parallel cousins and the 
latter cross cousins.

More related to your question, Japanese has eight ways to write cousin, 
differentiated just by sex (2), just by relative age (2), and by 
combinations of the two (4). That is, the types of cousins are female, 
male, older, younger, older female, younger female, older male, younger 
male. The catch is that all eight combinations are pronounced the same: 
itoko.

HTH
Benjamin Barrett
a cyberbreath for language life
livinglanguages.wordpress.com

Doug Trick wrote:
>
> The English word "cousin" refers to the offspring of a
> parent's sibling. Since the offspring is either male or
> female, a parent is either male or female, and the parent's
> sibling is either male or female, there are (at least) 8
> potential combinations:
> - male offspring of father's brother
> - female offspring of father's brother
> - male offspring of father's sister
> - female offspring of father's sister
> - male offspring of mother's brother
> - female offspring of mother's brother
> - male offspring of mother's sister
> - female offspring of mother's sister
>
> I recently read somewhere that Farsi has 8 distinct forms,
> corresponding to the above. Can anyone confirm whether or
> not this is true? Or, can anyone confirm whether any other
> language has 8 distinct forms? Or even 4 different forms?
>
> Doug Trick, SIL Philippines
>
> __._,




 
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