The Oldest Profession and the Middle Brother
I'm back from break now. On my last evening in CA, while we were out having a nice family dinner, the subject of prostitution came up somehow [I remember how, but now that I've hit the big time, that information is classified]. Anyway, it soon became apparent that my 14-year-old sister maintains a semantic distinction between 'prostitute' and 'hooker' that neither my parents nor I have. She couldn't put her finger on it, but I have noticed before that she can use 'hooker' in both the senses of 'whore' (i.e., not only a prostitute, but also any other sort of non-professional promiscuous woman), whereas I can't. Lest you think I'm building the case for some deep linguistic analysis here... nope. I just thought that was kind of amusing.
Also, there was some weird [to me, at least] usage in our local rag sheet this week. In an article about a kid at my alma mater, Michael Arvizu wrote the following:
"Both his parents - his mother is a violinist, his dad also a cellist - are professional musicians, his older brother, a UCLA student, is a pianist and trumpeter, and his middle brother is a violinist. Spelz and his middle brother play together and are sometimes hired to play quartets and trios."To me this is very ambiguous as to whether the 'middle' brother is older or younger than the one who is the subject of the article. It seems like the 'middle' brother is #2 in birth order, with the subject being #3, or else the subject is #2, the 'middle' brother is #3, and there is a #4 (presumably 'younger') brother who, it seems, plays no instrument. Readers, do you share my intuition? 'Middle' seems relatively clear when viewing a set of brothers as a whole, but relative to a member of the set whose birth order is not previously defined, it confuses me.
One final note: there's a very positive review of Stephen Anderson's Doctor Dolittle's Delusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language in the issue of Nature that just came out today. I haven't read the book-- I've reeeeally had enough of the whole uniqueness of human language debate.
7 Comments:
To me, it means unambiguously that there are three brothers, in birth order A, B, and C, and the middle brother is B. That may not be correct, of course, but that's what the wording means to me. (I may be influenced by the fact that I'm the oldest of three brothers, so I use the term "middle brother" quite a bit.)
I agree with LH. But maybe that's because I'm the oldest of three, too! Hence, I'm parsing the quotation as:
oldest = "older", pianist and trumpeter at UCLA
middle = violinist
youngest = Spelz
Actually, middle brother doesn't sound great to me (middle sister is even worse, for some odd reason. Poor middle siblings!).
Too bad English doesn't have non-periphrastic terms for different brothers and sisters with regard to birth order or relative age. Tagalog conveniently has panganay for eldest (son or daughter) and bunso for youngest (no term for the middle siblings). Older brother (as well as cousin and other close kin) is denoted by kuya and older sister (et aliae) by ate. Kuya and ate are also titles prepended to names in addresses or references (neither I nor my brothers have given up our titles despite Americanization).
Okay, so I'm weird, then. What else is new? ;-)
Angelo, I agree with you about the pathetic inadequacy of English in terms of kinship designations-- several years ago, my best friend taught me the Gujarati aunt/uncle terms so I could less akwardly distinguish between my dad's brothers (he's #2 of 4), their wives, and my mom's sister. Really useful! Unfortunately, there's very little that can be done to help to disambiguate my cousin situation-- I've got nine, all on the paternal side, all male, eight of them younger than me.
I actually never got the hang of English terms for extended family. What does Nx removed mean? In Tagalog, grandparents are lolo/-a, but so are all their siblings (and cousins)! Great aunt/uncle: these at least I learned fine. My parents' siblings and cousins are all aunts/uncles (tito/-a). I think I have the 1st/2nd cousin distinctions down. The rest of the English system: boh! Funny how the systems can be rich and impoverished in different ways.
Were I to address older cousins, I'd have to use kuya/ate. Filipinoly, since you'd be Ate Bridget to your eight younger male paternal cousins, you needn't worry what to call them. :P
Caelestis, my understand of English blood-relationship terms is as follows:
Suppose A and B share a common ancestor, and that they are respectively I and J generations from that ancestor. If I=0, then for J=0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., B is A's self, child, grandchild, great-grandchild, great-great-grandchild, ... respectively.
If J=0, then varying I, B is A's self, parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, and so on.
Now we have left the cases where I and J are both greater than 0. If I=1, then for J ranging up from 1, B is A's sibling, niece/nephew (no epicene term), grand(niece/nephew), great-grand(niece/nephew), and so on. If, on the other hand, J is 1 and we let I range upward from 1, B is A's sibling, aunt/uncle (again, no epicene term is available for this relationship) great-(aunt/uncle), and so on. Notice that there the grand- prefix is not employed in this case, so the great- prefix kicks in one generation sooner. This leads to the bizarre reciprocal pairs grandniece/great-aunt, great-grandniece/great-great-aunt, and so on.
Now we arrive in cousin-land, where I and J are both at least 2. Here I am slightly at sea about whether reciprocal terms are always identical, but I think they are. If I and J are equal, A and B are (I-2)th cousins; one can optionally leave off the "first" in "first cousin". If I is less than J, A and B are (I-1)th cousins (J-I) times removed. (If I is greater than J, just exchange them.)
So: the degree of cousinhood measures the number of generations from the notionally senior cousin back to the children of the common ancestor; and the removal degree measures the difference in generation levels between the cousins.
Note that the terms are ambiguous: if I say that Chris is Pat's second cousin twice removed, you don't know which of the two is notionally senior.
I'd be interested in hearing if anybody has different intuitions about this; I apologize to our host for this thread-hijacking.
I blundered in my first paragraph about cousins, above. Where I said (I-2)th cousins, I meant (I-1)th.
Thanks, Bridget and ACW (I think I need to make a chart, though).
Post a Comment
<< Home