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Relatively Speaking

Limits exist on how different languages define family relationships, a new study finds. English describes a mother’s mother and a father’s mother as “grandmother,” and a mother’s father and a father’s father as “grandfather.” New Guinea’s Abelom tongue uses one label for both of a mother’s parents and another term for the father’s. No documented language has a term for a mother’s father and a father’s mother, or for a mother’s mother and a father’s father, perhaps because such categories are overly complicated. Credit: C. Kemp, T. Regier

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  • erm, no.

    Many Indian languages have a different word for paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, maternal grandfather and maternal grandmother

    And they are spoken by a lot of people too, not at all rare.
    alok kumar alok kumar
    May. 25, 2012 at 10:00am
  • @alok: It's not completely clear from the diagram, but what the article is trying to say is that there is no language that has one term that can be used for both paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather (horizontally in the figure), or one term that can be used for both maternal grandmothers and paternal fathers (vertically in the figure). Naturally there are several languages in the world that have different words for each type of grandparent.
    W F W F
    May. 29, 2012 at 9:59am
  • Dr. German Dziebel’s Book The Genius of Kinship (2007) compliments this study regarding the amount of diversity employed by tribal groups when identifying kinship systems. He found the greatest amount of diversity, with all 8 systems in place, in the Americas. Linguists have identified the greatest number of languages, nearly 2/3, emanating in the Americas. Geneticists have found that Native American Tribes contain nearly 60% of the diversity found in sub-Sahara Africa or 80% of all of Japan (Ward et al. 1991). All of these discoveries should point anthropologists to the Americas when searching for human origins. Application of the “null-hypotheses” has never been applied to the Americas despite numerous findings that should question the omission of the Western Hemisphere from this search for our human wellspring.
    Alvah Hicks Alvah Hicks
    May. 29, 2012 at 9:59am
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