Family members

[magid]

Random thought the other day: In English, family relationships are inherently gendered.... except for cousins. And since English doesn't have gendered nouns (unlike, say, French, Spanish, or Hebrew), there's no way to know. It's an interesting anomaly in an otherwise gendered web (aunt/uncle, son/daughter, niece/nephew, mother/father, sister/brother), and I have no idea what it would turn out that way, other than perhaps how cousin is so often stretched to cover a bunch of relationships. Still, it's odd.

(Of course, different societies have more or less interest in particular kinship relationships. Hebrew has a word for the relationship between parents of a married couple, for instance, and some societies put much more value in age order withing a sibling group. I'm sure there must be places where the sister of one's spouse is easily distinguished from the wife of one's sibling, but we call both of them sister-in-law.)