Saturday, December 03, 2005

Relations' names

This is probably one of the less important things to have gone through my head today, but I'll ask anyway. When we get married, my brother will be Melinda's brother-in-law, and her parents will be my parents-in-law, and so on. But does our language have a specific word for their relationship to each other, or are we stuck with my son-in-law's brother and my brother's wife's parents, and so on?

If, as I think is the case, English doesn't have such words, does Turkish? I know Turkish generally has more words to describe peoples' exact relationship with each other....

2 Comments:

kris said...

as far as i know, you're unfotunately stuck with the long, drawn-out extended-family-in-law names. of course, "my brother's wife's parents" could be *slightly* shortened to "my brother's in-laws" - or, when all else fails, just use first names and when people say "well, who's that?" just tell them to shut-up :)
~k

9:15 AM  
Tyger said...

brother's wife's parents would also be sister-in-law's parents

I still haven't fully gotten the hang of things like "second cousin once removed"!

My brother and brother-in-law have the same name, making it much more fun.

1:42 PM  

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