Kinship terminology

Something that has been irking me is the inability (so far) to have kinship terminology in this site. The problem is that English, Russian, German, and French have kinship systems that are a bit more basic that those found in Turkic. Many of the languages I am aware of employ complex systems that distinguish maternal or paternal relationship, relative age, and gender. This means that many grammars and dictionaries will translate a term simply as brother (rather than older or younger brother) or aunt (rather than father’s sister or mother’s brother’s wife).

A second issue is that there is considerable variation both between languages/varieties and within languages. This makes comparison difficult. Also, many terms are borrowed from other languages, such as Turkish hala and teyze (maternal and paternal aunt, respectively), which were borrowed from Persian.

Perhaps I’ll work out a new scheme for more complicated lexemes and morphemes. Some day I’d like to have kinship terms, case morphology, verbal morphology and other forms; for now I’ll focus on more easily defined terms.

23000 surpassed, considering even more glosses

I’ve nearly completed adding Karakhanid data from Dīwān Luγāt at-Turk. This has brought me to 23000 entries. This also means that I’m nearly out of sources to consult until I can visit a bigger library (which is still difficult due to COVID).

I have considered adding 50 new glosses, which would bring my total up to 500. I’m considering new body parts/functions (palm, feces, pus, sole, hoof, vein), some plants and animals (cockroach, juniper), directional/positional terms (top, bottom, interior, side), and a few random conceptual and cultural terms (wedding, color, thief). I have 38 terms so far; the Dīwān index was very helpful in choosing these. Once I have decided, I’ll post them here. I’ll also do some background work to ensure that I’m not going back to the same sources and looking for terms that aren’t in there. It’s frustrating.

As side note, I have really enjoyed reading the following article: Janhunen, Juha. “Issues of Comparative Uralic and Altaic Studies (3): The Turkic Plural in *-s.” Altai Hakpo, 2017. He breaks down a lot of issues relating to the unusual number of paired items ending in /z/, the z~r controversy, and typological issues related to paired/plural items.