[Lingtyp] Kinship systems that distinguish age but not gender

[Majid, Asifa]

There's a lovely paper by Anggoro and Gentner looking for linguistic relativity effects of Indonesian vs English kinship systems: http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/AnggoroGentner03.pdf


________________________________
From: Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] on behalf of David Gil [gil at shh.mpg.de]
Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 10:50 AM
To: Matthew Carroll; Kyla Quinn; Alexandra Marley; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Kinship systems that distinguish age but not gender

Matt beat me to it on Malay/Indonesian!  I would just like to add that while many (most?) varieties that I am familiar with work the way Matt describes, some exhibit an asymmetry in which elder siblings are distinguished for gender while younger ones are not.  This pattern is also evident in closely-related Minangkabau:

adiak - 'younger sibling'
uda - 'elder brother'
uni - 'elder sister'

And I suspect that it is common in other languages of the region.


On 19/07/2017 10:40, Matthew Carroll wrote:
Hi Guys

What about Indonesian/Malay? kakak/adik for elder/younger sibling respectively.

Best,
Matt

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 9:31 AM, Hedvig Skirgård <hedvig.skirgard at gmail.com<mailto:hedvig.skirgard at gmail.com>> wrote:
Dear LINGTYP,

Does anyone know of a language that has a distinction in the kinship system for age of referent (younger/older) without also having a distinction for gender of referent? For example, a language that marks siblings as being younger or older to ego without reference to being sister or brother.

The hypothesis is that this doesn't happen/is very rare. We'd like to know if you've come across any examples of this.

I'm asking for my friend Alex (cc:ed) who is not on the list. Please direct any responses or comments to her.


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David Gil

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