[Lingtyp] Kinship systems that distinguish age but not gender
David Gil
gil at shh.mpg.de
Fri Jul 21 15:51:07 UTC 2017
Peter,
I'm not sure whether there's anything in Minangkabau corresponding
precisely to your two registers in Sasak. But of course, the terms I've
been loosely referring to as kinship terms in Minangkabau (and
Indonesian) have so many other functions pertaining to politeness and
the maintaining of inter-personal relationships that I feel one is doing
them an injustice by labeling them as kinship terms.
Random example: a young Minangkabau woman has (at least) three terms for
'elder brother' available, /uda/,/mas/ (borrowed from Javanese), and
/abang (/borrowed from Indonesian)/. /She might use /uda/ to call a
waiter at a local-style restaurant, /mas/ to call a waiter at a
western-style restaurant, and /abang/ to call her husband. And then of
course, her inventory of elder brother words will contrast with another
inventory of words whose literal meanings are 'father', 'uncle', etc.
As I suggested in an earlier posting, its not clear to me that these
words really are kinship terms, at least in an emic, language-internal
sense. Even though as typologists engaged in cross-linguistic
comparisons, it's convenient to talk of them as such.
David
On 21/07/2017 16:24, Peter Austin wrote:
> David
>
> Are there politeness differences in the Minangkabau system? C.f.. my
> earlier post about Sasak polite vs. non-polite terms. Deference is of
> course asymmetrical: owed to senior kin but not juniors.
>
> Peter
>
>
> On 21 Jul 2017 21:24, "David Gil" <gil at shh.mpg.de
> <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:
>
> Apologies to everyone, but some of what I said in previous
> postings about sibling terms in the languages of Indonesia turns
> out to be inaccurate.
>
> I had said that Minangkabau and other languages possess the
> following system:
>
> younger sibling
> older sister
> older brother
>
> In fact, I neglected to take into account a fourth term, older
> sibling, which results in the following system
>
> younger sibling
> older sibling
> older sister
> older brother
>
> So while the system still maintains the asymmetry whereby gender
> is only distinguished for older siblings, not for younger ones,
> the distinction is optional rather than obligatory. Here are the
> amended text counts for Minangkabau and Jakarta Indonesian, with
> the older sibling term now thrown in to the mix:
>
> Minangkabau
> 591 - younger sibling
> 536 - older sibling
> 998 - older sister
> 1197 - older brother
>
> Jakarta Indonesian
> 3050 - younger sibling
> 3982 - older sibling
> 749 - older sister
> 710 - older brother
>
> So with older sibling now included, Jakarta Indonesian now falls
> into line with Minangkabau: in both languages, older siblings may
> be sex-differentiated while younger siblings aren't, and
> correspondingly, older siblings occur more frequently in texts
> than younger siblings. (The main difference between the two
> languages is that amongst older siblings, sex differentiation
> occurs relatively more frequently in Minangkabau than in Jakarta
> Indonesian.)
>
> Apologies, once again, for the inaccuracy of the earlier
> postings. (I'm certainly learning a lot about the languages that
> I work on from this thread.)
>
>
>
> On 21/07/2017 14:36, David Gil wrote:
>> Two unrelated comments on Martin's latest.
>>
>> First, I think that one can indeed argue that sex is less
>> important for cousins than for siblings. One of several possible
>> reasons: Given a culture with nuclear families, limited bathroom
>> facilities, and modesty constraints governing cross-sex bathing,
>> whether my siblings were brothers or sisters would affect my
>> daily life much more than whether my cousins, who I only met once
>> a month, were male or female.
>>
>> Secondly, some very rough and ready frequency counts from two
>> languages of Indonesia that distinguish gender for older siblings
>> but not younger ones:
>>
>> Minangkabau
>> 591 - younger sibling
>> 998 - older sister
>> 1197 - older brother
>>
>> Jakarta Indonesian
>> 3050 - younger sibling
>> 749 - older sister
>> 710 - older brother
>>
>> Minangkabau conforms to what I take to be Martin's
>> generalization: older siblings are more important than younger
>> ones, and this is reflected both in (a) a gender distinction, and
>> (b) greater frequency, a roughly 4:1 ratio. However, Jakarta
>> Indonesian exhibits a conflicting pattern, in which younger
>> siblings are referred to roughly twice as frequently as both male
>> and female older siblings together. These differences could be
>> due to differences between the languages, or differences between
>> the corpora, or both. Lots more work needed here ...
>>
>>
>>
>> On 21/07/2017 10:39, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
>>> It is indeed an interesting suggestion (by Bingfu Lu) that sex
>>> neutralization in kinship terms is related to the importance of
>>> sex for observers. This factor may also explain that we often
>>> have sex-differentiated terms for domestic animals, but rarely
>>> for wild animals.
>>>
>>> But the "importance" of sex differentiation is not easy to
>>> assess. As Greenberg notes, there is a tendency to neutralize
>>> sex also in more remote relationships (e.g. with cousins, where
>>> even English neutralizes, and with in-laws), and it is hard to
>>> argue, for example, that sex is less important in cousins than
>>> in siblings. So maybe frequency of use is a better explanation
>>> after all? Does anyone have frequency counts for 'younger
>>> sibling' and 'older sibling' terms? (And frequency counts for
>>> domestic as opposed to wild animals?)
>>>
>>> I also have a comment on Maïa Ponsonnet's crictical remark
>>> concerning the term "universal":
>>>> However, I wonder is calling such hypotheses "universals" too
>>>> early can create other problems. We may then omit to disqualify
>>>> the hypothesis, even after many, many counter-examples have
>>>> been provided. So we may end up postulating universality based
>>>> on say, 10 cases, and 10 years later still be busy providing
>>>> counter-examples for what we still call a "(potential)
>>>> universal" while say, 20 counter-examples, have already been
>>>> provided.
>>>>
>>>> So perhaps calling it "hypothetical implication" may be safer?
>>> The danger certainly exists that some claims become very famous
>>> and are repeated and believed even though there is no good
>>> evidence for them (e.g. that spinach contains a lot of iron).
>>>
>>> But I feel that it is clear that every claim in science has the
>>> status of a hypothesis that is subject to potential
>>> disconfirmation. The differences reside in the amount of
>>> supporting evidence. The Konstanz Universals Archive
>>> <https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/> is a great resource both
>>> for references to claims of universals and for the basis of the
>>> claims (thus, without reading Greenberg (1966), one can see that
>>> universal No 1656 is based on 120 languages).
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>> On 21.07.17 01:16, bingfu Lu wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I agree with Martin’s bold claim. It seems to be very natural
>>>> in the following senses.
>>>>
>>>> First, from the formal perspective, babies are very likely to
>>>> be neutralized in sex. If there is a continuum of sex
>>>> neutralization from the point of being very young (babies) to
>>>> the point of very old, then, the younger section, which
>>>> includes the babies, should be more likely to be neutralized.
>>>>
>>>> Second, from the perspective of linguistic iconicity, babies
>>>> tend to be sex-neutralized because their sex features are least
>>>> developing. And it is natural, the less sex-developing, the
>>>> easier to be sex-neutralized.
>>>>
>>>> According to the degrees of development in sex features, it
>>>> might to be predicted that there may be some languages where
>>>> the very old elders are neutralized in linguistic form, since
>>>> very old elders are sex-retrodegraded.
>>>>
>>>> In short, the sex neutralization is more likely when the sex
>>>> features are less strong and less important in age.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> On Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 5:10:32 PM GMT+8, Martin
>>>> Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
>>>> <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On the basis of Turkish (/kardeş/) and Minangkabau (/adiak/),
>>>> which neutralize the sex distinction in the younger sibling
>>>> term, one could propose the following universal:
>>>>
>>>> "If a language makes a distinction between elder and younger
>>>> siblings and neutralizes sex only in one type, then it
>>>> neutralizes in younger siblings."
>>>>
>>>> This may seem bold, but I think that such bold formulations are
>>>> productive in that they are likely to elicit responses from
>>>> language specialists whose language goes against the
>>>> generalization. (And if the bold generalization makes it into
>>>> print somewhere, then one can even write an abstract on the
>>>> basis of one's data and argue against a previous claim.)
>>>>
>>>> Now it so happens that a claim very similar to the one above
>>>> has already been made, on p. 76-77 in Greenberg's chapter
>>>> "Universals of kinship terminology", which is Chapter five of
>>>> his most important work:
>>>>
>>>> Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. /Language universals, with special
>>>> reference to feature hierarchies/. The Hague: Mouton.
>>>>
>>>> Greenberg formulates the generalization in terms of one kind of
>>>> kinship being "marked", the other "unmarked". "Marked" features
>>>> tend to be neutralized, so saying that younger siblings are
>>>> "marked" amounts to the same as the above claim. (In my view of
>>>> things, this would mean that some kinds of kinship features are
>>>> more frequently used than others.)
>>>>
>>>> (Greenberg also says somewhere that masculine/male is unmarked,
>>>> so he probably predicts that female terms ternd to be
>>>> neuralized for age, thus answering Siva Kalyan's question.)
>>>>
>>>> So there are a lot of interesting predictions that could be
>>>> tested if someone finally made a comprehensive world-wide
>>>> database on kinship terms (I think some people near Hedvig are
>>>> working on this).
>>>>
>>>> Martin
>>>
>>> --
>>> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
>>> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
>>> Kahlaische Strasse 10
>>> D-07745 Jena
>>> &
>>> Leipzig University
>>> IPF 141199
>>> Nikolaistrasse 6-10
>>> D-04109 Leipzig
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>> --
>> David Gil
>>
>> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
>> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
>> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
>>
>> Email:gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
>> Office Phone (Germany):+49-3641686834 <tel:+49%203641%20686834>
>> Mobile Phone (Indonesia):+62-81281162816 <tel:+62%20812-8116-2816>
>>
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>
> --
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
>
> Email:gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
> Office Phone (Germany):+49-3641686834 <tel:+49%203641%20686834>
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia):+62-81281162816 <tel:+62%20812-8116-2816>
>
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--
David Gil
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816
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