Looks like this constant should be parsed as: ElderCousin && (MothersSiblingsDaughter || FathersSistersDaughter)

Mother's Sibling's Daughter or Father's Sister's Daughter.

FYI, Mother's Sibling is 舅舅 (Mother's Brothers) or 姨 (Mother's Sisters), and Father's Sister is 姑姑.

二舅 Mother's second Brother?

The "CN" is just the prefix for the Contacts framework, it doesn't refer to Chinese

表姐 means older female cousin of a different surname. If surnames are always passed down via the father that implies an elder cousin who is either your mother’s sibling’s daughter or your father’s sister’s daughter.

So what happens if, by chance, a woman in your family marries someone of the same surname? Does the 表姐 label then not apply where it otherwise would?

The phone will freeze until the battery is completely drained. NEVER connect the charger while in this state!

Simple; that was forbidden:

https://books.google.com/books?id=u9MUAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA19#v=one...

Should still be the same. By the way, it's considered quite unlucky/distasteful to marry someone with the same surname.

It's still a specific relationship in chinese kinship, which is likely why it was included as apparently CNf statically encodes all possible relationships.

And, in fact, CN has never referred to Chinese - it's an ISO two letter country code abbreviation for the PRC, admittedly - but the ISO two letter language code would be ZH for the Chinese language.

Exactly... Could it not just have been named

    CNContactLabelRelation表姐
?

In case you're serious I'd have to rely on IDE completion or copy/paste to input this, not being familiar with chinese input methods. It would also make it trickier to compare identifiers and make sure that it makes sense.

I think it makes more sense to keep all identifiers in English or alternatively provide completely localized versions of the API in other languages, going halfway is just going to confuse everybody. Remember for instance the confusion created by PHP using hebrew in the symbol for the '::' operator: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/592322/php-expects-t-paa...

I am genuinely curious why not. Interesting to know that history about php!

A middle ground might have been to use a transliteration such as CNContactLabelRelationBiaoJie.

Your point about input makes sense in that it's technically possible to type the English identifier without Chinese input methods, although I would be surprised if anybody typed that long-ass English identifier without IDE completion or copy-paste either!

The point about being able to more easily compare, I disagree with - the long identifiers are hard to check.

IMO if an API exposes an uncommonly-known but well-defined concept, I think it's acceptable, and better, to ask users of the API to learn the concept before use rather than paraphrase it.

It better matches what developers are likely going to try to do: if anyone is ever going to write a program that has to care about this case, I'm pretty sure the spec isn't going to be something like "if the contact is the user's elder female cousin who is either the user's mother's sibling's daughter or the user's father's sister's daughter..." - it's likely going to say, if not in Chinese, "if the contact is the user's 'biaojie'..."

There is good precedent for this kind of preference for expressing concepts that aren't broadly familiar in technical APIs. You'll get some symbols containing words like AffineTransform or CMYK in it, and probably many programmers wouldn't know what they stand for either until they need to learn what they are, but that's ok and better than dumbing down the API to something like RotationOrTranslationOrResizingOrCombinationThereOf or PrimarySubtractiveColorSystem.

> In case you're serious I'd have to rely on IDE completion or copy/paste to input this, not being familiar with chinese input methods. It would also make it trickier to compare identifiers and make sure that it makes sense.

I'm not sure it's easier with the super-large English name

Is Chinese the only language with this relationship?

Also, identifiers in Apple frameworks are always ASCII.

They could have used Pinyin. Even people who don’t speak Chinese and have to look it up would have an easier time understanding it than trying to parse this identifier.

When I put this in Google Translate, it auto-detects Japanese and gives me "outer cover." When I specify Chinese, it just says "cousin." So it's not trivial to look up.

Presumably you would google "CNBiaoJie" and find Apple documentation explaining the concept.

(As an aside, Google Translate is a terrible way to look up the definitions of specific words. It is not a Chinese-English dictionary and doesn't try to be. Wiktionary would be a much better free option.)

Google translate and Bing translate are extremely unreliable for ideographic languages.

And then every time you re-read the code you have to look it up to understand 1/ what the hell is even this and 2/ is it the right one at the right place.

Yes, which I think is easier than having to parse and understand this identifier every time you see it.

Especially since after a few times you will remember what it means and not have to look it up anymore. There's a good reason we use jargon for complicated concepts rather than re-explaining them every time they're used. "while" is a lot easier to understand once its meaning has been explained to you than "EveryTimeWeGetHereCheckIfThisConditionIsTrueAndExecuteThisCodeBlockAndJumpBackHereIfSo".

Whereas with this English symbol that might not fit on a screen, there are none of those problems?! If the concept is foreign to you to begin with, but you have to care about it for some reason, you're going to have a bad time with either 1 or 2 no matter what the symbol is. (Though I agree that transliterating to BiaoJie would make it easier.)

I'm not sure it's the only culture having this specific relationship, but it's perhaps better to make sense to some than to none?

A Chinese person, an Apple engineer and a HN reader walk into a bikeshed...

I'm assuming those Mandarin characters comprise the word for that relationship? I was wondering why this existed and I thought maybe they were adding the Hindi words for specific relatives (there's many, I assume the same is true for Mandarin).

Mandarin is a spoken language. The characters are "Simplified Chinese" in this case. The characters will sound different read in different languages.

e.g. the two Traditional Chinese characters 東京 translate roughly to "Eastern Capital" and are read dōngjīng, while they are also valid Japanese Kanji where they have the same meaning and are read as Tokyo. (Yes, the name of the capital of Japan.) Interestingly, Běijīng and Nánjīng similarly mean "northern" and "southern" capital respectively.

There was once an Eastern Capital in China which is also named as Kaifeng, the capital of the Northen Song Dynasty. It is to east of Chang'an, which is now Xi'an, and the capital of most of earlier dynasties.

In Chinese culture, your male line ancestry matter more. Your mother's family is considered auxiliary ('外家'), thus only your father's brother's children are considered in the same family, and these cousins are labeled “堂”, all the other cousins are labeled "表”, and "姐" means older sister.

Is this why it is a mother's sibling of any gender, but only a father's sister?

That's my understanding, a difference is made between paternal lineages (through the father's brothers) and maternal (either father's sister or any sibling of the mother).

Possibly denoting similar v different family names?

Younger Cousin should be 表妹. Was the title edited?

Sadly yes, because "younger" is longer than "older": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20352001

For those in this thread, the mods adjusted the link slightly from Elder to Relation; please keep that in mind when reading.

From Elder to Younger, actually.