Re: Lack of vocabulary in English?
From: Paul Wolff (bounceme_at_two.wolff.co.uk)
Date: 02/18/05
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Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 00:26:06 +0000
In message <cv39b4$haj$1@news.ox.ac.uk>, Neeraj Mathur
<neemathur@hotmail.com> writes
>
><de781@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:1108673024.095062.285650@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
>>> And I would have been very surprised indeed if he had called me
>> "Cousin
>>> Once Removed Peter"!
>>>
>>> In English, "uncle" and "aunt" can be used loosely as well as
>> precisely.
>>
I was certainly brung up to call intimate family friends "Uncle" or
"Aunt". I am just getting used to calling my godfather, now well into
his nineties, "John" rather than "Uncle John".
>>
>> No one expects him to have called you "Cousin Once Removed Peter" or
>> anything that absurd! But, the fact of the matter remains that you
>> can't EXPECT your cousin to refer to you as an "uncle", when you're not
>> his uncle. My sisters' children will likely call me "uncle", but it'd
>> be absurd for my cousins' children to think of me as an uncle.
>
>It's not that absurd, it's just not the way that the English system appears
>to work (thanks to those above who approved my diagram interpretation).
>
[Snip]
>
>The different systems must reflect different social patterns. My grandmother
>(the 'sagi' one) tells me that when she was growing up the children of many
>of her father's siblings and cousins all lived in her father's house (he was
>wealthy enough, of course) and it would have been pointless to think of some
>people as siblings and some as not as far as daily life was concerned. Even
>today it is not uncommon for several siblings to live in the same ancestral
>house with all their families.
>
And I heartily commend it, if the house is large enough. My maternal
grandfather had six children and none left home until after their
marriages. Those who were recently married, during WWII in the early
1940s, if women stayed in the house with their children, and if men left
their wives in the house with their children while they went
a-soldiering; and all of us, cousins and mothers, formed truly close
relationships with each other which have lasted fifty and more years.
We cousins might as well have been siblings. Sadly, only the cousins
now survive; our parents have died, with one exception, who can no
longer remember (but still enjoys a drink with her carers).
-- Paul In bocca al Lupo!
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