In 19 years, I have never been in this sub-forum before, so please forgive me if this has been duscussed before.

 

As we know, Thais have special words for family members, whereas in English we generalise much more.

Thais have very specific names for family members, to determine which side of the family and being older or younger than someone.

In English for example, your gran is your gran, regardless of which side of the family.

Your aunt is your aunt, and we don't care which side of the family or the age gap to your mum or dad.

Now, I won't get into them calling a cousin or even a friend 'brother' or 'sister' because I'm sure that's been discussed before.

However, they have the same word for nephew as they do for grandson, and the same word for niece as grand-daughter! How can this be? To compare a nephew to a grandson, one is a direct descendent and two generations down, whereas the other is not direct and one generation! I have asked multiple Thais about this, and a few have tried to say that there's a different tone or name, but they all end up agreeing that the word is the same. WEIRD! 🫣😶🧐

arai arai gaw aroi  !

1 hour ago, 2long said:

However, they have the same word for nephew as they do for grandson, and the same word for niece as grand-daughter!

Same thing in Italian. It doesn't make sense to me either. 

⁹Same in Dutch, "neef".

 

Grandson and nephew are both 2 steps away from you:

I - my son - my grandson (linear related)

I - my brother - my nephew (collateral relationship)

Quite a few languages merge these 2 kinds of relationships.

 

See page 31 of the linked file, and have fun reading the whole file. The tables (look at the contents, there are 3 big sections of tables) give you a taste of how languages can work.

Unfortunately,  they don't discuss Thai.

 

https://archive.org/download/systemsofconsang00morgrich/systemsofconsang00morgrich.pdf