Of brothers, sisters, nephews, uncles and knights

PalmaWhen I was a boy, we often passed through Cas Concos des Cavaller on the way to Santanyí. I always imagined stories related to that knight. Until one day I wondered who the 'concos' (uncles) of that knight might have been. In Mallorca, the word 'conco' is still used – a variant of 'oncle' (uncle) – to refer to the brother of a father or a mother. There is also 'blonco', another variant of the same word, also used in Ibiza. In certain dialects of continental Catalan, 'conco' is used for a man who has not married, an old bachelor. It is a word shared with Occitan and French, which has been borrowed by various Germanic languages such as the English 'uncle’, the German ‘Onkel’ (there is also ‘Oheim’, but it is considered archaic).

But what do we mean when we say 'uncle' or 'cousin'? It seems we are referring to a relationship between two people as members of a group; relationships that, looking at the family tree, go in one direction: for example, Toni is Bel's father, but Toni is Joana's son. We can easily imagine a kind of arrow that goes up or down within the tree, depending on what we want to specify.

It was precisely when I was studying German that I realized that in Dutch we do not distinguish between 'cousin' and 'nephew'. In both cases, we say 'neef’ (if it is a man) and 'nicht’ if it is a woman. How can that be? If they are clear and distinct things in Catalan. What has happened then with the relationships and the arrows of the family tree? I had to ask relatives and check dictionaries because I found it very strange. 'The logic' of my Catalan told me that there had to be a different word for each level of the family and for each direction of the relationship because they were different concepts. But it is like that, in Dutch they are not differentiated. The Germans have 'Neffe’ and 'Nichte’ for nephews and they borrowed from French the words ‘Cousin’ and 'Cousine’, absolutely transparent to us (they have in certain variants 'Vetter’ for male cousin and 'Base’ for female cousin).

Dutch eccentricity

This Dutch eccentricity turns out to be shared by Hawaiian, a language from the other side of the world, and by certain varieties of Basque. The Dutch example warns us that the world's languages can create a very different lexicon to describe family. We cannot take for granted that we will find equivalent words to our Catalan, even if it is a language spoken a few kilometers away from our own. This is seen in Basque: its term for 'brother' or 'sister' will change depending on whether the person who has this relative is a man or a woman: to say that Pere has a brother, they say he has an 'anaia', but if Margalida has a brother, then they say she has a 'neba' (or an 'anaia', depending on the dialect). On the other hand, the term 'sister' has two completely different forms: Pere has an 'arreba', but Margalida has an 'ahizpa'.

This indicates to us that Basque encodes something more than just the relationship within the family tree, but also the perspective of the sex of the reference person: before the reference was Pere, in the second case it was Margalida.

Other languages in the world make these differences, and even more complicated ones. The Lakota language of North America also differentiates 'brother' from 'sister', depending on whether the speaker is a man or a woman. But in addition, it has different forms depending on whether it is an older brother or a younger brother. That is to say, in one word they take into account the family relationship, the sex of the referent, and whether this relative is older or younger than the referent.

On the other hand, we do not always differentiate cousins very much: if they are close, the child of an uncle or aunt, we call them a 'good cousin'; and if they have a child, we will say 'cousin's child'. That is, we simply add a nuance to be able to differentiate what place they occupy in our genealogical tree. In Spanish, the closest ones are called 'primos hermanos'. And the others, 'primos segundos'', 'terceros', etc. In contrast, Lakota uses completely different words, and furthermore, it takes into account whether these cousins are on the maternal or paternal side. I am aware that this does not much encourage signing up for Lakota courses.

One aspect that not all languages specify in the same way is the relationship of those who, through marriage, join the family. Here we do have a very specific and detailed system: ‘father-in-law’, ‘mother-in-law’, ‘son-in-law’, ‘daughter-in-law’, ‘brother-in-law’, ‘sister-in-law’. The English simplify this by simply adding ‘in law’ (‘by law’): ‘father-in-law’, ‘mother-in-law’, ‘son-in-law’, ‘daughter-in-law’, ‘brother-in-law’, ‘sister-in-law’. They even have ‘cousin-in-law’ for the person married to a cousin, what we would call a ‘cousin-in-law’.

We have seen that kinship terms can encode different types of information, and that this depends on each language. But we have also seen that not all languages encode the same kinship concepts.

Organization as a group

The family schema is something that is learned precisely by talking with people around us, from our family, in an almost intuitive way. Why do we do it, and why can we do it? There is no clear or simple answer. In some way, structuring and classifying family members helps us organize ourselves as a social group, while at the same time reinforcing our identity as members of a specific group. The thing is that there is no universal social group, but rather there are several, depending on the history of each culture. Anthropologist Dwight W. Read, specialized in the study of family relationships and the logic that builds them, relates them to the cultural evolution that has accompanied the evolution of the human being for millions of years. Professor Read considers that this ability to think about family structure is recent, a consequence of the significant evolution of cognition that our species has experienced, and would be a trait that differentiates us from other great apes and, therefore, an innovation of the Homo sapiens.