Sure in academic language there is probably a way to describe it but nothing quuck that you can tell a kid so they immediately know which of the grandparents we are going to visit without naming them or the location they live in somehow?
And I am not saying the concept doesn't exist, only that as far as I am aware there is no usable everyday word for it.
I mean: nobody will tell their kids they are going to visit dads mum and dads dad next week, rather than telling them they are going to visit grandma and granddad "across the country" or something?
So there must certainly be families in the English-speaking world where kids commonly say "dad's dad" and "mom's dad". Even when unlike in Scandinavian languages, it's not the canonical form.
I'm not sure I've met anyone who doesn't have more familiar terms than dad's mom and mom's mom. They're probably out there, but not super common.
"One is repairing to the country where one will be enjoying the company of one's paternal grandmama and grandpapa."
repair [1]
verb
repaired; repairing; repairs
intransitive verb
1a: to betake oneself : go
repaired to the judge's chambers
But as far as I am aware English only uses grandsomething (or variations of it) + further description as needed.
In Swedish and Norwegian you always specify because the words for grandparents are inherent specific to whether they are paternal or maternal.
I agree that almost every use of farfar should be simply translated as grandmother.
Similarly in many languages using the wildcard equivalent to mean something more specific is unnatural.
Unlike those other languages we talk about.
Would your grandparents' contact be saved on your phone as "Mom's mom" or as "grandma"? Probably the second, which is indistinguishable from "grandma" as "Dad's mom".
In Norwegian, people would naturally call these "mormor" and "farmor" and they would expect that relationship to be correctly labeled in their localized app.
> I am fairly sure English doesn't have (or at least does not use) separate everyday words for farmor/farfar.
They then said you would need "academic" language to describe mom's mom and dad's mom. That's why I said I could not tell if they were serious. Anyway, I think you would be surprised if you asked English speakers what they call their grandparents. I personally used memere and grandma to distinguish between my mom's mom and my dad's mom. The point I'm making is that not having specific words for these relationships does not make English speakers unaware of the difference.
There are probably hundreds or thousands of nickname words for grandma based on a variety of cultural backgrounds, family tradition, and mispronunciations by grandchildren.
The language we use really depends on setting. In a more formal setting we might say paternal grandmother/grandparent. Speaking to a friend we might use the nickname, or we might say the ambiguous 'grandma' or we might say 'grandmother on my dad's side' or 'dad's mom'.
It really depends on the situation and familiarity and formality.
That is the distinction I tried to make above between academic and everyday language.
On the whole, Bulgarian has far more such relationship words than English.
And then from my kid's point of view, not only are these all 'auntie' but so is my very own sister.
Mor = mother
Far = father
Bror = brother
Morfar = mother's father
Farfar = father's father
Farmor = father's mother
Farfar = father's father
Farbror = father's brother
Morbror = mother's brother
...
Faster = fathers sister
Moster = mothers sister
You can also use tante (aunt) about these
A farbror or morbror is often called an onkel (uncle).
* Mother's brother = mamoo
* Mother's sister = khala
* Father's older brother = Taaya
* Father's younger brother = Chacho
* Father's sister = Phupo
Each of these's spouse also has a corresponding word. For example, Father's sister's husband will be Phupa.
Then, their children are identified with a suffix.
Mother's brother's son = Mamoo zaad bhai
Mother's brother's daughter = Mamoo zaad behan
Etc.
I don't exactly agree. Note that this constant embeds two terms, exactly because this particular kinship term does not distinguish them. In the other word this constant can only reasonably used in the Chinese kinship system, and others will be confused regardless of whether it's translated or not. The reasonable UI should group such labels into some dedicated section like "Extended families (Chinese system)" so that they don't need to be translated literally. Same for other kinship systems, of course.
That’s what databases are for after all. You can’t encode every possible version of a familial relationship as a constant.
Then why not call it CNLabelContactRelationYoungerCousinParentsSiblingsDaughter ?
This bug is about contact cards, and so the relationship is necessarily between you and the contact. So, it's not like you need to translate 表妹 into English, or differentiate it from 表姐 in English, as it's something you have chosen to describe the relationship. If you just think of them as "cousin" or whatever you use in your language, that's fine, just use that label. But, once you've assigned e.g. 表妹 to a contact, you don't need to translate that to English if you change your locale... because you already know what it means, because you chose it in the first place!
Admittedly, there's an issue when you receive a contact from someone else, but then you will probably be changing that field anyway. Unless we are family, you sending me a contact for your aunt is unlikely to also be my aunt, and if it is, well I probably also share that native language with you. I'm sure there are edge cases, like siblings who were separated when very young and the parents moved to different countries, or adopted, or found via DNA testing or whatever. But even in those few contexts, learning about the word or having the person themselves explaining the relationship to you, probably helps overall understanding of the relationship.
In any case, a lot of the Chinese words for the various familial relationships are quite amorphous. I remember being very surprised when a Chinese friend posted some photos on Wechat of her 孙子, literally "son's son". My initial reaction was "She can't be old enough to have a grandson!" then "Wait? She has a son? I thought she was single..." Turns out, she was referring to her brother's son. Lots of people use 哥, 弟弟, 妹妹, 姐姐 (literally older brother, younger brother, younger sister, older sister) to mean their friendship group, although this is probably a result of the impact of the one child policy. 阿姨 and 叔叔 (aunt and uncle) are just respectful terms for people of similar age to your parents, etc. There's literally no point trying to translate these names into their literal English meaning, because it will just further confuse people.
So, then the big problem becomes where these labels come from. Is it a dropdown box where only the options available in your current language are presented? How do you then choose one that's available in a different language if that's what you want to use? Presumably these aren't translated too literally into other languages, as e.g. an English speaker isn't going to want to choose one of 4 options for "cousin", and hopefully would be immediately suspicious of why their phone wants that much information about the nature of their cousin-ness, when it's customary to just use a single word. How then would that get translated back into Chinese? It would be embarrassing at family events if someone saw that the male cousin on my mum's side was labelled as female cousin on my dad's side.
I think it'd be much easier if you could just type what you wanted into this relationship field, maybe with a drop-down or auto-complete for likely options in your language.
Congratulations, you reinvented the exact UI for this that already exists in iOS from first principles.
Use of kinship terms to describe non-kin is clearly not related to the one-child policy given that it’s a language feature of Chinese that occurs across multiple political lines. It also appears in other languages, such as Korean.
Chinese also differentiates kin vs non-kin address. 哥哥 is typically used to describe a blood relation. 哥 and 哥哥 have very different connotations if used to refer to a non-relative.
It's the main one that English speakers are probably exposed to; but even in this thread there are mentions of other languages and cultures where this or similar relationships have specific terms and more generic ones like "cousin" simply don't exist.
Grouping them all under "Chinese system" is... let's say culturally insensitive.
_That_ is a reason enough to not use the term from any specific language as a constant name; let enough to not expose that in the UI to users.
It’s probably the vast majority of people using it though? Simply by virtue of being such a massive country.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_...
E.g. Mother's sister = Mausi
Mother's sister's child = Mauseri/mausera
Father's younger brother's child = chacheri/chachera
And so on.
Although some of these are more obscure and I'm not sure how commonly they are used these days.
Notably, mapping the entire path isn't congruent with the concept in the topic, which encompasses both "Father's sister's daughter, younger than me" and "Mother's sibling's daughter, younger than me" in one phrase.
This isn't the case, any more than the English word 'aunt' embeds four terms (your father's sister, your mother's sister, your father's brother's wife, your mother's brother's wife). Plenty of languages distinguish between all four of these relationships. But the English term refers to what we see as a single concept - an aunt.
Most family words have translation difficulties like this. The concepts are usually more generic, more specific, or in some cases incomparable when moving between cultures. This also applies to many other words - even ones for very prosaic objects. The French have a single word which means "metallic object which has a particular shape in order to be able to turn something matching that shape", and they use additional qualifications to distinguish between a door-opening-shaped-metallic-turner and a bolt-undoing-shaped-metallic-turner.
The localization system seeks to avoid 2 things: that when an English speaker adds 'Mary (relationship: Aunt)' as a contact, they have to be asked "Is Mary actually your fathers-sister-aunt or your mothers-sister-aunt?" (Because that person would find it strange and unncessary.) Secondly that where possible, someone who has access to this information in another locale, doesn't see a low-quality translation, in particular one which makes no sense ("US English Kinship Relation �� Mary"), or which is misleading ("Mary is John's father's brother's wife? But I'm married to John's father's only brother!"). The right way to do this is to record a reasonable representation of the intended meaning in the source locale, and to translate into the destination locale. Since English also happens to be the language used for the code, the value "LabelContactRelationAunt" looks less complicated than this one, but it really isn't.
This can be seen by how it will be translated. In a locale where the English concepts encompasses two words, it might be rendered as "(Father-Aunt) or (Mother-Aunt)". In a locale where there are 4, 8 or more relationships which could be described in English as an aunt, they might use something intentionally less specific like "OlderFemaleRelativeNotAGrandmother" rather than a laundry list of possibilities. In others yet it might make sense to use the literal English word, or a contextualization like "Western 'Aunt'", if that's the easiest way to explain the relationship.
Nothing about this is unique to either English or Chinese.
IIRC correctly, already the Mac UX guidelines in the 80s included non-Latin scripts, right-to-left etc.
Lesson: make no assumptions and be very thoughtful about what seems to be edge cases from your own cultural point of view.
I disagree insofar as you really need the explanatory text in the documentation to be able to parse the constant’s name correctly, especially if you’re not already familiar with that specific relationship category. It would also be helpful for the documentation to point to the Chinese/Vietnamese/etc. terms to provide context. In that light, a shorter constant name would have been appropriate IMO, for developer ergonomics.
Even if you want to include “full” information, CNLabelContactRelationYoungerMaleCousinNotViaFathersBrother would have been shorter, if I understand the relationship correctly. (The fact that I’m not entirely sure here also indicates that more documentation is needed.)
This is a constant intended to be displayed after localizing the constant. Its localized value will primarily be displayed to users whose preferred languages have a short word describing the relationship.
But it ALSO needs at least some comprehensible localization in EVERY language, because I can send you a vcard for myself labeling this specific type of cousin (because that’s how I think of her), and I don’t know in advance what languages you use.
The primary customer of this family of constants is a localizer, who by virtue of localizing Apple software needs to know English, but may not read or understand Chinese.
The constant embeds everything that an English-speaking localizer needs to explain the relationship in a different language. That’s why something like the proposal here[0] (just use the Chinese name for this relationship) would not be an improvement.
A fully generic DSL to describe relationships wouldn’t help localizers know which relationships are actually used in the real world.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716546