Timeline for substitution for uncle and aunt
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 3, 2020 at 22:34 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | "We don't have non-gender-specific words for aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew in common usage" means that those words do exist. It's natural to then ask "What are those words?" Such trivial information can be of no practical use to a learner. In fact it's not even useful for me as a native speaker, because no other native speaker I know would understand those words. | |
| Mar 3, 2020 at 22:31 | comment | added | Toby Bartels | @CJ Dennis: I don't understand. I'm not suggesting that you tell anybody anything; in my hypothetical edit, I would make you tell people less things, making your statement weaker so that it becomes true. (And these words are in no danger of dying out. They might or might not spread from the academy to common usage like ‘sibling’ did, but they're established in their current contexts.) | |
| Mar 3, 2020 at 22:13 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | @TobyBartels I still wouldn't tell a learner that. It's irrelevant information. By the way, only one of these neologisms seems to have gained any acceptance. Just because someone makes up a word doesn't mean it will be accepted or survive. There are many famous authors who invented lots of word, only a few of which we still use today. | |
| Mar 3, 2020 at 22:00 | comment | added | Toby Bartels | @CJDennis : I'm not saying that you should tell learners that they exist, but now that you know about them, I hope that you wouldn't tell anybody that they don't exist. I won't be so presumptuous as to edit your text in this way, but if I were, then I'd change ‘We don't have non-gender-specific words for aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew.’ to ‘We don't have non-gender-specific words for aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew in common usage.’ or something along those lines. | |
| Mar 3, 2020 at 16:58 | comment | added | jamesqf | @Angew is no longer proud of SO: Got me. Some people understand, and apparently take pleasure in understanding, the minutae of relationships. A lot of people don't. (And as you might guess, I'm one of them :-)) | |
| Mar 3, 2020 at 13:20 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | @TonyK They're all second cousins or more, but still cousins! | |
| Mar 3, 2020 at 12:51 | comment | added | TonyK | How can you have cousins if you don't have any aunts or uncles? | |
| Mar 3, 2020 at 7:33 | comment | added | Angew is no longer proud of SO | @CJDennis Sure. I was just trying to be funny and reconcile the quoted Shakespearean cousin with today's use. | |
| Mar 2, 2020 at 22:22 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | @TobyBartels I've never heard of these words before and I wouldn't tell a learner that they exist. Learners shouldn't use obscure words, they should be taught the most idiomatic forms only. | |
| Mar 2, 2020 at 21:50 | comment | added | Toby Bartels | There are gender-neutral English words for ‘aunt’/‘uncle’ and ‘nephew’/‘niece’: ‘auncle’ and ‘nibling’. These are both used when needed in academic literature but not widely in colloquial English. But then, the same was true of ‘sibling’ a century ago. | |
| Mar 2, 2020 at 21:19 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | @AngewisnolongerproudofSO Most people don't use "zeroth". Technically, your siblings are your "zeroth cousins", but no-one would ever say that (except in jest), just as aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews are not called "zeroth cousins once removed". | |
| Mar 2, 2020 at 21:16 | history | edited | CJ Dennis | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 2, 2020 at 21:14 | comment | added | AbraCadaver | Also, your Aunt or Uncle may not be your father's or mother's sibling but a spouse of their sibling. | |
| Mar 2, 2020 at 16:58 | comment | added | Monty Harder | "(Note that my father's sister-in-law can also mean his wife's sister, who is not related to me.)" I knew a pair of brothers who married sisters, so they had double sisters in law. | |
| Mar 2, 2020 at 16:58 | comment | added | Monty Harder | @jamesqf In ordinary speech, people are more likely to say "on my mom's side" than "maternal", or "on my dad's side" than "paternal". | |
| Mar 2, 2020 at 16:30 | comment | added | Kevin | "(Note that my father's sister-in-law can also mean his wife's sister, who is not related to me.)" Unless your father and mother were divorced and your father had remarried, this would just be your maternal aunt, no? | |
| Mar 2, 2020 at 16:28 | comment | added | Kevin | @AngewisnolongerproudofSO Lol. Technically, yes. | |
| Mar 2, 2020 at 11:08 | vote | accept | lee | ||
| Mar 2, 2020 at 10:34 | comment | added | Angew is no longer proud of SO | @jamesqf You could say a nephew/niece is a zeroth cousin once removed, right? | |
| Mar 2, 2020 at 5:26 | comment | added | jamesqf | Though it would be rare to have "maternal" or "paternal" used in ordinary speech. It's used only when there's some reason to make a distinction. Likewise, there are a lot of relationship terms, like "second cousin once removed" that are mostly used by geneaology nuts, and not understood by the rest of us. They seem to change with time, too: in Shakespeare, "cousin" seems to include what we'd call nieces and nephews. | |
| Mar 1, 2020 at 22:15 | history | answered | CJ Dennis | CC BY-SA 4.0 |