Lesson 3b: Kin

The dominance of kinship and corporeal terms in Lesson 3 serves a didactic purpose, but the main purpose of this entry is different. Thus I shall point out (yákıd) that kinship and corporeal terms are inalienable and therefore require prefixes (no bare dó:k'o, but only dadó:k'o). Kinship terms are inalienable because your blood relatives are your relatives, however much you may wish they were not.



English has an impoverished (although not the smallest) system of family terms, commonly referred to as the Eskimo system. In English, you can distinguish the following relatives without resulting to compounds: son, daughter, father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, cousin, niece, nephew, grandson, granddaughter, grandfather, and grandmother. Latin distinguishes between maternal and paternal relatives. Washo has a much more complex system than either Latin or English, many of which Jacobsen introduces in one blow.
Washo has many specific terms for various relatives. This category infodump is typical of Jacobsen's approach.

By the end of Lesson 3, there are enough kinship terms to construct a small family tree. Lesson 1 featured íyeš "daughter-in-law", but there is no word for "son" yet, so let us lay that term aside for now. Mr. EGO (in Washo, would this be Mr. le?), the usual stand-in for general genealogical charts, is not an only child, but one of a brood. Few exemplars of kinship systems are. He has an elder brother (da'á:tu), an elder sister (da'í:sa), and a younger brother (debéyu). His parents are absent, but two women of the previous generation survive: his maternal grandmother (degú'u) and his grandmother's sister (debık'ı), though (not necessarily?) the sister of his maternal grandmother.