1059: Kinship Systems and Translatability Nov 2, 2017

English has plenty of words for the different people in a family such as 'brother', 'sister', 'mother', 'father', 'grandparent', 'aunt', 'cousin' etc. This is fairly typical for other languages; words for things that are important and fairly basic will have simple one-to-one translations to most other languages usually, while other things may require a full sentence, like words for snow in Inuit or indeed the Inuit word 'iktsuarpok' which denotes an excited anticipation waiting for something and repeatedly checking its arrival (e.g. when excitedly waiting for friend or an event and constantly checking the time). Nevertheless, some languages have more or very occasionally fewer words for family-members than English does. It is thought that Proto-Indo-European had more words for family-members, such as a single term for "son's wife" which English needs to construct with multiple words, and plenty of languages have different words to differentiate between paternal and maternal grandparents and/or aunts and uncles. On the other hand, Pirahã does not have a word for 'mother' or 'father' and instead just has the equivalent of 'parent' [màíʔì], though this is still quite similar to the near-universal phonetic trend for words denoting 'mother'. There is also no evidence that the speakers denote familial relationships any more distant than siblings; it is the most simple lexicon to denote members of a family that linguists are aware of.