I recently read the book Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas. It's a great fun, funny read, heartwarming and poignant, and the genealogist in me was struck by something she wrote in the chapter entitled "It's all relatives" - cute pun. She says that there are 4 different words for uncle in Farsi (aka Persian), the predominant language of Iran. And there are 8 different words for cousin in Farsi, depending on the exact relationship of each cousin (whether related on mom or dad's side, and more specifically than that). In English, we have a bare-bones vocabulary for family relationships by comparison... sometimes when I am explaining family relationships to my family members, I find myself having to go beyond "he's your second cousin once removed" to saying more specifically "he is your grandmother Sarah's first cousin's son" or something like that. This got me wondering how these family relationships are handled in other languages (ALERT: convergence of my geeking out - languages and genealogy!!!) and I resolve to look into this, although the languages I have studied formally (French, German, Spanish) I'm pretty sure don't have a level of specificity much beyond gender distinctions for cousins (which we don't have in English). I am knee deep in genealogy projects right now, but stay tuned in case I ever get back to this and share an updated post. LOL!!! Keep it cute, cousins!
No comments:
Post a Comment