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Path: utzoo!utcsrgv!dave
From: dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Missing Words
Message-ID: <2240@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-Sep-83 09:35:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.2240
Posted: Wed Sep 14 09:35:19 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Sep-83 10:29:23 EDT
References: <2435@teklabs.UUCP>
Organization: The Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 26

We usually have no term for a relative name simply because it
wasn't important enough to distinguish it for long enough for
the language to develop a term. There are many others that
you didn't point out:

1. brother-in-law (wife's brother) != brother-in-law (sister's husband)

2. maternal grandfather vs. paternal grandfather. The use of "maternal"
and "paternal" has developed recently in response to a greater need
to distinguish them.

3. There is no word in English equivalent to the Yiddish "mechutonim".
These are one's child's in-laws. (That is, your parents and your
in-laws are mechutonim to each other.) In some societies, this
relationship was/is important enough to merit its own title.


The same kind of thing happens with pronouns, too. Some languages
have two words for "we": the inclusive we, which includes the
listener, and the exclusive we, which excludes the listener. This
distinction is quite useful ("Can we go out tonight?" will have
quite different meanings, for example).

Dave Sherman
-- 
 {cornell,decvax,floyd,ihnp4,linus,utzoo,uw-beaver,watmath}!utcsrgv!lsuc!dave