[Lingtyp] Someone whose father ...

Thu Feb 17 10:24:47 UTC 2022

Hi Raffaele,
There are many indications that Australian languages privilege talking about kinship, and have particularly rich and complex semantic structures, including trirelational terms ('the one who is your mother and my daughter, you being my granddaughter') in many cases as well. See Murray Garde's 2013 book 'Culture, interaction and perrson reference'.
As a first attempt at theorising how one could account for this impact of cultural selection, I attach an article I wrote in 2003. But at the time that was rather programmatic. More recently, with Danielle Barth and other colleagues, we have been looking at 'parallax corpora' to see whether we can find differences across speech communities about how often reference is formulated in terms of kinship – see the second attached article (section §4.4). There are many many references to 'kintax' (a bit misleading since it's also morphology) in the Australianist literature – some can be found in the reference lists for these 2 articles
Best Nick

Nicholas (Nick) Evans

Director, CoEDL (ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language)

Coombs Building, Fellows Road
CHL, CAP, Australian National University

nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as custodians of the land on which I work, and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. Their custodianship has never been ceded.

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Raffaele Simone <rsimone at os.uniroma3.it>
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2022 9:01 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Someone whose father ...

Dear friends and colleagues,

many thanks for the rich, valuable information you have given me by answering my question. What I was looking for are kinship terms incorporating complex relational semantic structures. Actually, I am not interested in the relatively well-known structure “a bereaved child” (“orphan”), but in its opposite “a bereaved parent”, apparently much more rarely implemented by an individual lexeme.

It is very interesting that Australia seems to be the area where that structure is so extensively lexicalized. It does not seem to me this is the case in Europe as well. Is this for some cultural reason? For example, for matters associated with inheritance law?

Thanks again and best,

Raffaele S.

Il 17/02/2022 04:26, Mira Ariel ha scritto:

Hi,

Hebrew has an adj. shakul – one who lost a close relative. It must collocate with a noun, and specifically with mother, father, parent (less commonly, with brother and sister). Impossible with grandmother, uncle, grandchild, etc.

Note that a bereaved parent is most likely not symmetric with 'orphan'. An orphan is young. You wouldn't say about an adult that she is (currently) an orphan. But the shakul  adj. can apply till old age.

Empathy, social consequences etc. determine the use, no doubt.

By the way, Hebrew also has ariri 'one who has no children' (distinct from akar 'can't have children'). This is also socially consequential. I'm not even sure if a parent who lost their only child would count as ariri or not. It's certainly not the central meaning, although the consequence is the same – "the family is discontinued". Not surprisingly, this lexeme is disappearing these days.

Best,

Mira Ariel

From: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] On Behalf Of Jess Tauber
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2022 3:28 PM
To: Pier Marco Bertinetto <piermarco.bertinetto at sns.it><mailto:piermarco.bertinetto at sns.it>
Cc: list, typology <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org><mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Someone whose father ...

Perhaps the loss of a child is far more common in everyday experience (from failed pregnancy to accidents to disease than loss of an adult caregiver. Is there some sort of avoidance issue here leading to the relative rarity of such terminology? A child is the responsibility of an adult, so losing one is a potentially a stain on their reputation, whereas loss of an adult is generally not usually the fault of the child.

Jess Tauber

On Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 4:47 PM Pier Marco Bertinetto <piermarco.bertinetto at sns.it<mailto:piermarco.bertinetto at sns.it>> wrote:

Dear Raffaele,

looking at the issue from the other side (i.e., a child who lost her/his parents), you might consider this rather odd, idiosyncratic lexicalization of Wayana [way, Cariban]:

pikuku-tpë (lit. child-RETROSPECTIVE) = ‘orphan’ (Camargo 2008, ex. 26).

Camargo, Eliane. 2008. Operadores aspectuais de estado marcando o nome en wayana
(caribe). LIAMES 8. 85–104. [Aspectual operators of state marking the noun in Wayana].

Ciao

Pier Marco

Il giorno mer 16 feb 2022 alle ore 11:28 Raffaele Simone <rsimone at os.uniroma3.it<mailto:rsimone at os.uniroma3.it>> ha scritto:

Dear colleagues,

words like widower and orphan imply a complex web of relationships. An orphan is someone whose father or mother has died; a widower is someone whose wife or husband has died.

Do you know any language in which there are words that mean "someone to whom a child has died", "someone to whom a brother or sister has died" etc.?

Thanks,

R Simone

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