Even the way Chinese uses fictive kinship terms is oppressive in this way Yes, an older woman who's a family friend is an "auntie" and an old man you see as a mentor is a "grandpa" But because the terms are more specific there's this added shit
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Is she your auntie-on-your-mother's-side or on-your-father's-side Is she older or younger than your mom Assuming the grandpa guy doesn't actually know either of your parents, is it more of a friendship (like a maternal grandpa) or does he have authority over you (paternal)
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(The fact that the distinction between a "yeye" and a "gonggong" is you have to mind what the former says more because he has authority over you - because authority is transmitted patrineally - is kinda fucked up when you think about it!)
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I think there are some more detailed terms like this in English as well or rather the older versions of the language that just weren't carried over into modern usage because most of the time you don't need to be that detailed really.
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It is weird that we don't have a word meaning "aunts and uncles collectively" tho
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Stuff like this is why it’s funny to me when people are like, “CHINESE LANGUAGES DON’T HAVE GENDERED PRONOUNS, THEY’RE SO MUCH MORE FEMINIST THAN WE ARE” as if you can take a single aspect of a language and determine a culture’s attitude towards gender
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As someone with a lot of blanks in the tree, I’m glad that English makes it vague.
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i've got a lot of blanks on my mom's side, while my dad had twelve siblings and i genuinely am not even sure how many cousins i have - i also appreciate the vagueness
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Interesting, I hadn't thought of this before. The Sapif-Whorf hypothesis would imply that this would result in native Chinese speakers to think a lot subconsciously about family structure.
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This waa actually one of the hardest things for me to learn when I married into a Chinese family. To this day I have to stop and think about who er-bo is as opposed to da-bo (pardon my bad phonetics there.)
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