Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.

Savosavo Kinship Terminology: Social Context and Linguistic Features

This week's paper is on kinship terminology in the Papuan language Savosavo, which is remarkable as it covers fifteen generations; a rare feature, cross-linguistically. In this week's TyPoW you can talk about your own language's kinship system. Anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan identified six basic patterns of kinship terminologies, which are listed here. Even though those are the six underlying structures that have been observed in natural languages so far, each language may modify that basis, yielding distinct results. There are also some funky elements like the so-called dual propositus tri-relational kinship terms, found in some Australian Aboriginal languages. You can read more about them on the aforementioned wikipedia page. Now onto the prompts:

• How does your language handle kinship terms?
  • Which basic pattern (see above) does your conlang exhibit? Or is it impossible to categorize it like that?
  • How do kinship terms interact with other cultural elements? (e.g. taboos)
• How are kinship terms used in discourse?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

Submit your papers here!

So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

Hi all!
I was wondering, what are some good introductory sources that about kinship terminology?

One of my linguistics professors recommended me to write about kinship terminology in the Mayan languages for my Honors Thesis in linguistics. Kinship terminology is an area which I don't really know much about, so I'd appreciate any suggestions for good introductory sources to this topic. (He's currently busy, so I thought to try asking here while I wait for him to be free again).

Also, I was wondering: are there any major databases that collect data about kinship terms? If there are, I thought looking through them might help me understand how to structure any data that I find.

Thanks so much for reading!

What do you call your mother, father, older brother, etc.?

It seems Muslims from the subcontinent are expected to use ‘ammi’ ‘abu’ derived from Arabic. One of my Arabic friends used ‘oomi’ for mother. The formal Urdu word is ‘walidein’ for parents, walid for father, walida for mother. Colloquially ‘maan baap” or ‘mai baapa’

More Anglized forms such as ‘Mummy’ ‘papa’ are very common, at least in my family. Since we are from UP originally we use words like Amma, bhaiya etc. instead of Ammi and bhaijan. Father is ‘Abba’, ‘abu jaan’. Sister in law = bhaujani, bhauji, bhabi.

Uncle: chacha Chacha’s wife = chachi. Hindus use mausa, mausi

Father’s sister = phua, phupi, Phuppo Phuppo’s husband = phuppa

Paternal grandparents = dada, dadi. Hindus use ‘aaja, aaji”

Maternal grandparents = nana, nani

Older sister = aapa, aapi (preceded by given name)

In my vocabulary baba means old man and is not appropriate to use with one’s own father

https://youtu.be/YOi2c2d3_Lk

My sister's kid (20 years old) recently announced that they're genderqueer (preferring they/them/their), which I'm perfectly fine with and have been trying to mentally reframe my terminology in preparation for the holiday visit. One thing I'm stuck on is introducing them to new people and relaying our familial relationship. I figured out that I could say, "This is my 'sister's kid'." but do you have any other suggestions? I guess what I'm a little sad about is that it feels a little removed (and wanting some sort of more direct claim on their awesomeness? ha). If we can't come up with anything, I'm fine to let it go. Because I fully realize that this is more about me and their happiness is more important.

p.s. Happy Holidays, beautiful people! Keep recognizing your happiness wherever you find it!

Introduction

This will be a much-requested post in which I summarize, in chronological order, my Grand Unified Theories. I will provide citations to my long-form posts where you can find more details and evidence, if it strikes you. Even summarized it’s still pretty long, so I’m sorry for that in advance (TL;DR ended up being kind of ironic by the time I was finished).

If I do a good job at this, hopefully I won’t have to clarify anything. If you’re unfamiliar with my theories and reading this, I ask that you check the cited chapters for more details before offering criticism of the timeline! I’m specifically omitting evidence in order to keep this one brief and easy to follow!

Please note: for brevity’s sake, I will often use a specific date for an event that has a range (i.e. something happened between 2000 B.C. and 1000 B.C. might be labeled 1500 B.C.). Don’t take the exact numbers as gospel! The order in which the events occur and their approximate place on the timeline is what’s important.

It is also important to note that this will not be an exhaustive timeline. I will mostly only include contextualizing events and things that are a part of my theories.

This will include historical events in both the East and the West, but the labels and terminology for the timeline will be in Westerosi terms.

The Dawn Age (40,000 B.C. - 10,000 B.C)

40,000 B.C. - The world is young. Giants, Lions, Unicorns, the Children of the Forest are all commonplace at this time. The world’s First Tree, Ygg, is already ancient beyond memory. The cycle of the seasons is regular and lasts one year, as this was the time before the seasons were broken. Two moons float in the sky, and mankind is yet a young and savage race. [6][7]

22,000 B.C. - Garth Greenhand, an incredibly powerful sorcerer, is born in the Far East. Over the course of centuries, he unites the tribes of the Jade Sea along with his younger brother, another powerful sorcerer. [7][8]

In the Far East, Garth is remembered as the God on Earth, because he was worshiped as a Green God, demanding human sacrifice in exchange for making the land bloom. He taught mankind to farm, and the first cities in the world began to spring up along the coast of the Jade Sea. [7]

18,000 B.C. - Garth and his brother, having united the Eastern peopl

Disclaimer, I'm not a trained anthropologist so apologies if my terminology is off.

I recently read parts of Levi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship, and I found this attempt at explaining the origins of social/kinship systems quite fascinating. I understand Strauss's star has faded a bit in the field of anthropology, but I was curious about follow-up ideas or counterarguments to his hypothesis. I went and read a few articles in Jstor, and the vibe I seem to get is that while there are numerous holes and unexplainable elements of Alliance Theory, there is currently no wholesale counter-theory or alternative explanation for the origins of our current social and kinship systems.

Is this the case or do I need to read more (and if so, what would you recommend?).

Thank you

reading this twitter thread about the abolition of family has got me thinking about how much we fail to express our ideas in a way that is appealing to people. by all accounts, the thread expresses completely reasonable ideas that i myself tend to agree with, but i can't help but think: how would someone who isn't already invested in leftist politics react while reading it? the phrase "abolishing family" is one that most people would dismiss as nothing short of utterly ridiculous without the clarification that "kinship is not the same as The Family (an institution)" - which only happens halfway through the thread, by which point, they are probably not even reading it anymore.

and, of course, this isn't just a complaint about one twitter thread. ideas such as "abolishing work" or "abolishing democracy", among many others, suffer from the exact same fate as "abolishing family". we take ideas developed by academics and use their language without consideration for how the same terms are used in common parlance, and end up losing people for no reason other than fucking semantics.

i mean, fucking hell, these issues are present at the names for the very ideologies that we represent: society's understanding of "anarchy" is that of chaos, destruction and permanent unrest, and "socialism" and "communism" both have come to represent soviet-style authoritarianism and chinese state capitalism for most people.

over on r/anarchism, the response to this very issue was that "over half of our battle is education". and, i mean, yes, that is very much true. however, i don't think that we need to educate people about what our terminology really means. instead, i firmly believe that we need to explain our ideas using terms where you don't have to immediately add "but i don't mean what you probably think i mean", abandoning our academic language altogether. because when you say "i am an anarchist and i want to abolish family", you are immediately conceding to a battle that is basically lost already. after all, it is no coincidence that our ideas (not just as anarchists, but the broader left itself) are consistently more supported than the left itself.

Do your worst!

It really does, I swear!

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

They’re on standbi

Buenosdillas

The Ka is perhaps one of the most difficult concepts to describe, for there is no modern translation for this word. Essentially it appears to mean "double" as well as "vital force" and is a clear reference to a part of the individual that transcends the death of the physical body. The Ka was not only one's double but also a guide and protector, imbued with the spark of the divine.

Egyptologist Richard Wilkinson explains that "in all periods it is used as a term for the creative and sustaining power of life." The Ka came to be seen as a symbol of intellectual and spiritual power. The hieroglyph for the Ka is two arms raised as if mirroring each other. This hieroglyphic, used as an amulet, was worn to preserve the life force of the wearer.

According to pictures drawn during the 18th Dynasty, the Ka came into being when a person was born, often depicted as a twin or double, but, unlike the body it belonged to, it was immortal provided it received nourishment. The Ka was something handed down from one's parents, grandparents, and ancestors, like spiritual DNA, traceable in the very remote past to a creator god by way of lesser deities.

The Ka of a pharaoh was thought to be the collective life force of all his subjects - crucial to their well-being, indeed to their very existence. The term "By the Ka of the pharaoh" meant "by the good grace of the pharaoh."

Dying was referred to as "going to one's Ka." Upon the body's demise the Ka rejoined its divine origin, but always remained in close proximity of the body. In Old Kingdom tombs false or Ka doors were supposed to give this spiritual part of the deceased access to the world of the living. The Ka was thought to reside in tomb statues of the deceased. One of the most important functions of the Ka was to unite with the Ba so the deceased could reach the heavens and become an Akh spirit.

The paintings in Egyptian tombs recreated scenes from the daily life of the tomb-owner, so that his Ka could relive them

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

Pilot on me!!

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

When I got home, they were still there.

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

I won't be doing that today!

You take away their little brooms

This morning, my 4 year old daughter.

Daughter: I'm hungry

Me: nerves building, smile widening

Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.

She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.

Thank you all for listening.

Why

It’s pronounced “Noel.”

[Removed]

After all his first name is No-vac

What, then, is Chinese rap?

Edit:

Notable mentions from the comments:

• Spanish/Swedish/Swiss/Serbian hits

• French/Finnish art

• Country/Canadian rap

• Chinese/Country/Canadian rock

• Turkish/Tunisian/Taiwanese rap

I was recently watching a college lecture where the professor prefaced a discussion of game theory with "and the concept of a prisoner's dilemma is one of those things I am confident saying you are not an educated person in any meaningful sense if you have never taken the trouble to understand or learn it. The idea that we can map out the conditions under which cooperators will defect given individual incentives, even despite the fact that the collective incentive can be to cooperate for a higher payoff, is so fundamental to understanding the problems of the 21st century (like Climate Change) that I think it's only fair that we set our bar/expectations for the educated person high enough that they would know this enough to be able to act on it."

This got me thinking: what is your list (or solitary individual entry for what could become a larger list) of things every 21st Century person who likes to think of themselves as having achieved a serious education should know, but probably doesn't? I say "probably doesn't" because a list of what an educated person should know in general would be too long and (for the most part) too obvious for my purposes here (i.e. please don't say something like "the earth orbits the sun"). I also want people to emphasize knowing things that are considered groundbreaking in their respective fields and that may even have a practical or important connection to a larger issue, particularly the larger issues that we will be counting on the "educated (but common) person" to address in this century.

Pick any discipline you want, but try to meet my criteria. Here's mine! (A list like this is bound to sound opinionated and self-congratulatory because it's an attempt to list the things you think you already know but that many others don't, but for the same reason that the "rationalist" community has chosen a vaguely positive adjective for itself, and only aspirationally rather than narcissistically, I want you to put aside the self-conscious worry that you sound self-indulgent and just do your best to outline the greatest ideas an education can impart for someone aspiring to a true education)

These are not in any particular order from most to least important, but more "what occurred to me first," and it is bound to be horribly incomplete or include things it shouldn't--that's where you come in!

Here goes nothing:

1. Graham Oppy's concept of rational belief-formation as a process of "worldview comparison" where people follow the

There hasn't been a single post this year!

(Happy 2022 from New Zealand)

Nothing, it just waved

(Note: I originally posted this in r/asklinguistics , but I thought this question might also be appropriate here so I thought to try here too. I hope that's okay!)

Hi all!
I was wondering, what are some good introductory sources that about kinship terminology?

One of my linguistics professors recommended me to write about kinship terminology in the Mayan languages for my Honors Thesis in linguistics. I've learned a fair bit about the Mayan languages in my linguistics classes, but kinship terminology is an area which I don't really know much about, so I'd appreciate any suggestions for good introductory sources to this topic. (My professor is currently busy, so I thought to try asking here while I wait for him to be free again).

Also, I was wondering: are there any major databases that collect data about kinship terms? If there are, I thought looking through them might help me understand how to structure any data that I find.

Thanks so much for reading!

There hasn't been a post all year!