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Comment by TorKlingberg | Hacker News Reader

I can see why this is needed. English has very broad words for relatives like "grandfather" or "aunt". Most languages have more specific words, especially Chinese where there are separate words for fathers or mothers side, older or younger and sibling or siblings spouse. You also often use these relation words rather than their names when referring to a relatives. If this code was in Chinese, they would all be short words.

English words like "aunt" cannot really be translated into Chinese. If you are translating a book you either try to figure out the exact relation from the context, or just pick one if it doesn't matter. In someones address book you can't do that.

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I read a book where this difference in expressiveness removed a subtlety of writing from the translated version.

The original English version had a passage where it was unclear (on purpose) which grandmother was being referred to (it later turned out to be the one you didn't expect). However, with Swedish having no generic word for grandmother (only mormor and farmor), this nuance was lost in the translation.

In Vietnamese there are at least 4 different relationships that we call "uncle" (father's/mother's older/younger brother) in English! I have no idea how you refer to cousins. My teacher told me when he visits family he often doesn't know the word for his own relationships. Apple trying to capture a complete multilingual kinship lexicon sounds like an impossible task, I guess they must be focussing on specific languages here (Chinese is a good bet).

Similarly, English words "brother" and "sister" are sliced into five words in Korean:

    Elder sister of a girl
    Elder brother of a girl
    Elder sister of a boy
    Elder brother of a boy
    Younger sibling of whatever gender

So every time a "brother" or "sister" appears in English, a translator has to figure out their relative age, or make a wild guess.

Genuinely curious, but is it actually like that in most languages? I wondered if it was maybe an East/West difference, since I haven't come across that in my French & German learning, and I didn't think Dutch or Danish were like that either. But apparently Swedish does have this (eg faster/moster for paternal aunt & maternal aunt)?

(Most of my learning is via Duolingo, so I'm no expert, just curious.)

Turkish is like that, with mind-bogglingly specific words for apparently half the planet that are your distant relatives.

It’s losing them fast though. Newer generations just don’t really care, so the words are falling out of use. I really only know cousin, aunt, uncle.

Didn't even English have a bunch of words that were lost as time went by?

We do have quite a few words in Lithuanian (e.g. for maternal/paternal branches and more detailed words for "X in law"). But it was getting simplified in the past few decades. I've heard quite a few words that I couldn't describe without looking at the dictionary.

Yup - https://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/tutor/k...

Modern Russian has no difference between paternal/maternal aunt/uncle (though there are apparently archaic forms that denote the difference that no one uses).

On the other hand, it has different words for "wife's mother" and "husband's mother", which in English are both "mother-in-law". Similar for the "father-in-law" relationship: different words for "wife's father" and "husband's father". Similar for sibling-in-law relationships.

(Of course there's the open question of whether Russian would count as "East" or "West".)

Indian languages have this sort of kinship granularity. Some of these distinctions include:

* Maternal/paternal parental siblings, with distinct terms for their respective spouses

* Maternal/paternal parental sibling - distinct terms if they are older or younger than your own parent

Sweden has it, at least for aunts/uncles, and grandparents (and great grandparents, and great-great-grandparents...).

For aunts its faster/moster (portmanteau of father-sister, mother-sister, roughly). For uncles its farbror/morbror (lit. father-brother, mother-brother).

For grandparents its farfar/morfar (father-father, mother-father) and farmor/mormor (father-mother, mother-mother).

A great grandparent could be e.g. a farfarsfar, or father-fathers-father.

faster = faders syster = father’s sister. Same for all of them.

Ours is pretty simple, I imagine this system is intended to cover Chinese kinship which is _really_ complex. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_kinship#Common_exten...

Is there a notion in linguistics of languages being more "modular", i.e. tacking on details like this through additional words, versus having more and more specific words to cover these cases?

Coming from my native German, I am very much used to the former, so I always find it interesting to see how different other languages are structured sometimes.

Not quite the same thing, but languages (like German) that build up words for complex concepts by forming big words out of little ones are called agglutinative[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language

German is not considered an agglutinative language (you can google it if you don't believe me). German has long compound nouns, which isn't really the same thing.

English has long compound nouns too, by the way. You can make basically arbitrarily long nouns like "chief regional dairy inspector" in English. In German you would write this without spaces between the words. That's just a typographical convention, not a linguistic difference. It doesn't mean German's structure is fundamentally different from English's, and isn't what linguists mean by "agglutination".

If I recall correctly from my very limited knowledge, German is not really agglutinative, as it mainly just has the ability to combine preexisting nouns together into one word, while agglutinative languages take a root and then add a pre- and suffixes to build up new words related to the meaning of the root.

Taking the 7th example from this table [1], while you could theoretically construct something like "erfolglosenmacherwerden" in German and have it still sound somewhat comprehensible, that is not something that is actively done in the usage of the language and would sound about as strange as coming up with "to unsuccessfulmakerbecome" in English.

[1] https://aimdanismanlik.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/539526_38...

It’s a bit anglocentrists to never think that ”oh maybe there are other systems where it makes sense.” Hell, _most_ languages have more words for kinship than English! I always found it odd for example that grandfather doesn’t specify on which side. Like, how is that not super useful information?

Apple. Red apple. Green apple.

Grandfather. Maternal grandfather. Paternal grandfather.

Try making a five year old say ”maternal grandfather,” other languages have two-syllable words for all of these, like the Chinese words for which these are made.

Five year olds get along fine with whatever practices their family uses, for a five year old's life.

You say Maternal/Paternal Grandparents, or add last names, or use different names (eg Granny and Nana). I can't think of a situation where I've had to differentiate them as relatives, only as individuals, so I can't see a distinction being that useful.

Really, you’re going to defend this lack of precision? I’m sure you can get by but having precise words is rarely a loss. Anglocentric superiority complex eh.

Please don't break the site guidelines by adding personal swipes to an argument.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I disagree that calling out anglocentrism is a "personal swipe," it is relevant to the argument (i.e. that it is hard to see beyond your biases.) Discussion should surely not be stymied for the sake of civility, better we step on each other's toes and get our point across than sit in our respective corners and sulk.

I'm sure there was a better way to say what I said, but it was not mean-spirited as I am sure you can see.

You're right that I'm stuck in the Matrix so to speak, so I may well be missing out on something I'm not aware of. But I don't believe I've ever had to use the words 'Maternal/Paternal GrandMother/Father/Parent' which must say something about how often its used.

Maybe we could turn it around, maybe you only use the word because it exists, maybe its like defenestrate. We could get by perfectly well without it.

I don't believe I expressed on opinion on whether any one language was 'better', I could wax lyrical about the warts and shortcomings of the English language, I don't know enough about any other languages to say whether they are better or worse.

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