[Tibeto-burman-linguistics] kinship terms for 'cousins'

[nathan_statezni at sil.org]

တဝမ်းကွဲ means “one womb removed”. It is a native Burmese word and often used.

Nathan 

 

From: Tibeto-Burman-Linguistics <tibeto-burman-linguistics-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> On Behalf Of Yuan-Lin Yang
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2026 12:13 PM
To: FKLinguista <fklinguista at gmail.com>; tibeto-burman-linguistics at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Tibeto-burman-linguistics] kinship terms for 'cousins'

 

Dear Tyler,

 

Thanks for your email and concern. I think I need to be clear for myself. First of all, I did not feed AI any Pa’O data. I only gave it the corresponding Chinese and English descriptions and turned on the deep research to get better result. 

In fact, I was not going to investigate kinship terms at first. I just learnt that they don’t have a word for ‘cousin’ when I try to elicit a sentence with ‘cousin’ in it. Also, I know it is not the best way to consult AI first, but since I am also busy finishing my thesis at the same time (which is not on any TB lg), I didn’t have enough energy to do literature review on the topic now, so one fast way to satisfy my curiosity is to ask AI. And because it only gave me examples in three languages, I knew there might be a lack of sufficient data (and I might not give it a precise description at first either), so I think perhaps then it will be better to consult members like you on this list, who are surely way more experienced than me. I also guessed that it would be nice to have some little discussions on this topic here. But anyway, I think I should also apologise for causing some confusions here.

 

And for your reply on Burmese, I wonder the source of the word တဝမ်းကွဲ is from. Is it native to Burmese or borrowed from other languages?

 

Best,

Mickey.

 

 

 

FKLinguista <fklinguista at gmail.com <mailto:fklinguista at gmail.com> >於 2026年2月11日 週三，上午11:17寫道：

Dear sir,

 

If I may... As a general rule of thumb, you should not be asking ChatGPT questions about niche linguistic topics nor feeding it data from minority languages. Many, including possibly the speakers, consider handing over your data to LLMs to be unethical. ChatGPT is not always accurate, either, so it may miss information. It is not sentient like us, after all.

 

As to your question, most TB languages of Burma lack specific kinship terms for 'cousin'. Even though Burmese have a word for it (တဝမ်းကွဲ) in practice it's hardly used.

 

Best of luck

 

Tyler

https://www.tylerdavis.xyz/

 

On Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 21:51 Yuan-Lin Yang <firstboy11th at gmail.com <mailto:firstboy11th at gmail.com> > wrote:

Dear Tibeto-Burmanists:

 

I am currently working on Taunggyi (Northern) Pa'O, a Karenic language mainly spoken in the Shan State, Myanmar. Through yesterday's field session with my consultant, I learnt that their language does not have specific kinship terms for 'cousins' or 'ego's father/mother's brother/sister's child(ren)'. Instead, they just call them 'uncle/aunt's child/son/daughter' (but they do distinguish uncles or aunts of different ages and sides). And I have also tried to check whether such a phenomenon is prevalent in TB languages with ChatGPT, yet it has only found that Burmese, Lahu, and Lepcha seem to behave in the same way.

 

Thus, purely out of interest, I would like to know if similar phonomena is also found in the languages you work on. And if your language(s) happen to be other special cases, you are welcome to share as well.

 

Best,

Mickey,

MA student, Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University.

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