Thursday 23 May 2013

Relatives - a surprising omission

Last night I was going through some of these test sentences in a bid to find and plug obvious gaps in Vetela (of which there are still several).  While doing so I realised that, though kinship terms are probably often among the first vocab that many conlangers create, Vetela has for a good eight years got by with just 'mother' (liana) and 'father' (vaana)[0].  So I set about rectifying that, and this is a summary of what I ended up with:
  • There is now a general term for 'sibling' (tona), and brothers/sisters are effectively referred to as male/female siblings (vaitona/koitona)
  • Grandparents are 'two-parents', great-grandparents 'three-parents' and so on: kaivaana 'grandfather', suiliana 'great-grandmother'
  • Similarly for grandchildren: kailaita grandchild, suilaikoi great-granddaughter (< laikoi 'female child')
  • Aunts/uncles are to sisters/brothers as grandparents are to parents, so an aunt is a 'two-sister' (kaikoitona) and a great-uncle is a 'three-brother' (suivaitona)
  • The word touzana means direct lineal relation in either direction - i.e. either ancestor or descendent.  These can take the following pre-existing prefixes:
    • aku- 'previous': akutouzana 'ancestor'
    • kiu- 'subsequent': kiutouzana 'descendent'
    • ven- 'immediately previous': ventouzana 'parent'
    • in- 'immediately subsequent': intouzana 'offspring' (though the usual way to refer to one's children is still laita 'child')
  • Finally, half-siblings are 'parent-siblings', with maternal/paternal half-siblings specified as 'mother-siblings' and 'father-siblings' respectively, e.g. vaakoitona 'paternal half-sister'.
Not yet sure what, if anything, to do about cousins - stuff like kaikoitono laita 'aunt's child' is a bit of a mouthful...

[0] Clearly, coming as I do from a tiny family with little in the way of relations, such things aren't very important to me :)

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