[Lexicog] RE: WORDS FOR "COUSIN"

[Rudolph Troike]

The study of kinship terminology was for many decades the central obsession
of social anthropology, so there is a vast literature on the subject, with
systems of terminology classified according to how parents' parents and
and siblings, and their respective offspring, were labeled. Linguists were
always interested, because of the frequent morphological complexity of the
various forms, but Floyd Lounsbury famously made the topic of central
interest for awhile by developing a formal calculus for the computation of
terms within Iroquoian. Since then the topic has been largely forgotten in
linguistics, as reflected by some of the discussion on this list.

While the translations given by Kathy Pakatchi for Persian in response to Doug
Trick's question would be relevant to anyone interested in the classification
of the Persian kinship system, from a lexicographical point of view they
don't seem to qualify for the category of "term" that he was asking for, and
would not meet the ordinary criteria for "lexical entry" in a dictionary,
any more than one would expect to see "mother's brother's daughter" or 
"father's
sister's son" entered in an English dictionary. It is clear that the etic
distinctions among parents' same-sex and opposite-sex siblings are emic in
Persian, but their children are not distinguished by separate terms, being
labeled only by sex as "son/boy" or "daughter/girl". One might then expect
to see entries in a Persian dictionary for "pesar" and "dokhtar" (a famous
Indo-European cognate), with sub-entries for the extended application to
cousins in these phrasal combinations.

    Rudy Troike

POSTED BY:"KATHY PAKATCHI"  KATAYOON_PA at YAHOO.COM

Tue Nov 21, 2006 7:26 am  (PST)
>
>    Different meanings of Cousin in Farsi:
>   "Dokhtar Daee"= The daughter of mother`s brother
>   "Dokhtar Khaleh"= The daughter of mother`s sister
>   "Dokhtar Amo"=The daughter of father`s brother
>   "Dokhtar Ameh"=The daughter of father`s Sister
>   "Pesar Daee" = The son of mother`s brother
>   "Pesar Khaleh"= The son of mother`s sister
>   "Pesar Amo"= The son of father`s brother
>   "Pesar Ameh"=The son of father`s sister




 
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