Paucity of words for relationships

Please refer the following questions asked elsewhere on this site:

• Is there a word that means "the wife of one's brother"?
• What is the relationship name of my wife's brother to me?

I am a native Hindi speaker; Hindi has a plethora of terms referring to relationships. To take a trivial example, the term uncle may refer to father's elder brother, father's younger brother, mother's brothers, father's sister's husband, mother's sister's husband, all of which have specific addresses in Hindi.

I discussed the same with one of my teachers. She had the opinion that the development of language mirrors the cultural moorings of the society that uses the language. Now, since all of the above relationships have distinct status and reverence in the Hindi speaking society, that calls for different addresses. That may well not be the case in English speaking societies.

Is that correct? What other linguistic reasons may account for such a dearth of vocabulary in English in this area?

Solution 1:

You have noticed a very peculiar aspect of English vocabulary. As rich as it is in comparison to many other languages, due to its almost creole history, it really is impoverished in comparison to other languages in kinship terms.

But 'why' is always a difficult question, especially when mixed with cultural questions. There are the difficulties with Sapir-Whorf type explanations: both language restricting thought on one hand and the number of Eskimo words for snow on the other.

Does the lack of kinship terms reflect the cultural lack of warmth and caring for relatives among English speakers, that is not caring leads to the loss of the words (which etymologically do exist in the ancestor languages), or did the arbitrary lack of kinship terms contribute to the crumbling of English family values?

Any direction sounds much too tendentious, too judgmental, and requires too much unjustified and biased assumptions to choose.

The comparative lack of kinship terms does ask for an explanation but one backed up by linguistic and anthropological and comparative research. The only source that comes to mind is Levi-Strauss's 'The Elementary Structures of Kinship.' (primarily anthropological but as a by product a number of examples of kinship term systems.

English isn't alone in having relatively few kinship terms. Some other European languages have only a few extra (French, German) and some languages really only have names for their clan and generation (anybody of one's biological parents' generation might be called something like 'uncle' or 'aunt', even one's birth parents).

Having no definite answer to your question, I can only say beware of making cultural inferences based on restrictions to languages. Some languages have grammatical gender and others don't, but that doesn't mean the ones without can't recognize the sex of other people.

Solution 2:

It's true. English does not really have a very complete kinship system. But that's culture, not language. We can describe any relationship we need to; but we haven't burdened ourselves with special words for distant relations.