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love-stone · 7 years ago
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Gender-Neutral Linguistics Rambling...
So, I was bothered by the fact that there really isn’t a good gender-neutral term for “aunt/uncle”. Sure, we have “pibling” by analogy from “parent” and “nibling” (itself a portmanteau of “niece/nephew” and “sibling”), but that sounds awful. Other options are “ancle”/”unt” which either sound wayyy too close to one of the original words, or just sound...weird.
For my genderqueer linguistics nerds @mirandatam, @marrella-splendens, and others
tl;dr: I propose one of the following terms as a gender-neutral alternative for “aunt/uncle” in English:
“hyrne”/”hyrnie” meaning “corner” in West-Saxon/Old English (indicating the diagonal relationship one has to their hyrne). 
Alternately, “oblique”/”oblie” from Latin, having essentially the same meaning. 
“emodrie” as a portmanteau of “eme” and “mordie”, each an archaic Middle English term that refers to one’s maternal sibling. 
Alternately, some version of “parenum”/“parennie” (options include “renum”/“rennie”, “rena”/“rennie”, “ren”/”ren-ren”, etc.) from Latin “parent” and modeling after unused “patruus” (father’s brother) and “matertera” (mother’s sister)
“olkin” as a portmeanteau of “elder” (”old”) and “kin” from West-Saxon
Alternately, some version of “parent consociate” from Latin. 
(Explanations/frustrations/6 hours of etymological research summarized under the cut...)
I did some etymological digging, and found that both Old English and Latin had separate terms for matrilineal and patrilineal kin, even though today there is no longer a distinction. Thus:
One’s patrilineal uncle was a “patruus”(L)/”fædera”(OE)
One’s matrilineal uncle was an “avunculus”(L)/”eam”(OE)
Note that we still have “avunculus” in English, meaning “having to do with one’s mother’s brother”
One’s patrilineal aunt was an “amita”(L)/”faþu”(OE)
One’s matrilineal aunt was a “matertera”(L)/”modrige”(OE)
“avunculus” eventually became our modern “uncle”, and “amita” became our modern “aunt” in English today. 
This didn’t help me, as my plan was to essentially change the distinction from "aunt/”uncle” (with the focus on the gender of the person) to “X/Y” where the distinction was instead on which parent the family member was related to (as if “aunt” referred to all your mother’s siblings, and “uncle” referred to all your father’s siblings--regardless of gender). The hope would then be to combine both combinations into one word meaning “parent’s sibling”, but alas, I wasn’t able to come up with a good combination...
So, I decided to turn my sights elsewhere--looking at the etymology of our existing gender-neutral kinship terms, and see if I could find a different pattern to exploit. And so, I discovered:
“parent” comes from Latin “parere” meaning essentially “to bring forth” (a fitting derivation if I do say so myself...). It’s Germanic/West-Saxon equivalent would be “elder”. 
“spouse” comes from Latin “spondre” meaning essentially “to be betrothed to” (also very fitting). It’s Germanic/West-Saxon equivalent would be “gifted” or the archaic “hæmed” meaning “cohabitation/intercourse”
“sibling” comes from West-Saxon “sibb”, meaning “related” (both as a noun and an adjective), and the suffix “-ling” meaning “a follower or resident of X” (consider “underling”, “earthling”, “changeling”, etc.).
Unfortunately, Latinate kinship terms are incredibly gendered, so there is no direct translation for “sibling” in Latin. However, we could refer to one’s sibling as their “shared” or “connected” (since they share the same parents & bloodline) and use the verb “consocio”, giving us one’s “consociate” (kind of like “associate”).
“child” is a direct cognate from Old English “cild”, meaning “child”. It’s Latinate equivalent would be “infant”
“offspring” is another direct cognate with Old English “of-/æf-” (off) and “springan” (to spring-forth). It’s Latinate equivalent would be “fetus” (lit. “to be preagnant”, “to be fertile”, “to be young”)
“cousin” is weird. It’s a combination of Latin “com-” meaning “with” and “sobrin-x” meaning “matrilineal (a.k.a ‘second’) cousin”, or, more preciselly, the offspring of one’s “avunculus”: your mother’s brother’s children (where the ‘-x’ ending behaves just like in “latinx”--it takes the place of the gendered ending denoting a male cousin or a female cousin). Over time, “comsobrin-x” became “cousin”, and stood for all bilateral (meaning having to go in both directions familial relations of three persons or more (which we now have a much finer grain of distinction for: consider “great(-great-...etc.)-aunts/uncles” and “#th-cousin (x-times removed)”)
We unfortunately can’t make a direct analogous word for this in West-Saxon, since we don’t have any sort of terms for any kin past two persons of relation (including things like “grandfather”, though “ealdfæder” works okay for that...). However, we could refer to them as “X’s child” using “bearn”, thus giving us “fædræbearn/faþybearn” for partilineal cousins, and “eambearn/modri(ge)bearn” for matrilineal cousins. 
So, it seems that Latin likes to derive its gender-neutral kinship terms from verbal participles (which are still actually gendered in Latin iirc), whereas West-Saxon simply had nouns for them. This doesn’t really help, as I couldn’t really think of a good verb that embodies “the sharer of your bearer” (which despite being a bomb-ass rhyme, is simply too long to use on a regular basis...RIP), and there wasn’t any sort of established word in West-Saxon that could get the job done...
Compounding this issue is the fact that English makes no distinction between “my parent’s sibling” and “my parent’s sibling’s spouse”, despite the fact that one’s parent’s sibling’s spouse is the other parent’s “sibling-in-law”. Technically, by this logic, my father’s sister should be my “aunt”, and her husband should be my “uncle in-law” since he is my mother’s “brother-in-law”, and, unlike my mother’s brother, he shares no blood with my family. 
Turkish makes this distinction in it’s kinship terms, where one’s “enişte” is the husband of a parent’s sister, and one’s “yenge” is the wife of a parent’s brother. However, Turkish also distinguishes the gender of one’s parent and their sibling in addition to these terms (plus things like an older/younger brother/sister distinction), so you can imagine that kinship terms in Turkish are pretty overwhelming to a native English speaker. Also, this still unfortunately doesn’t help solve the problem at hand, since Turkish adds this distinction, instead of substituting it...
The reason I bring this point up is because a lot of appealing candidates for a gender-neutral term for “aunt/uncle” would involve some form of portmeanteau of “parent’s sibling”, but this is only half the story, unless we want to attach “-in-law” to all of our parent’s sibling’s spouses to remedy this fact. 
So, what was the point of this? Mostly to rant/waste the past 4 or 5 hours looking up etymologies to solve this problem, but I did come up with a couple etymologically sound options for a gender-neutral term for “aunt/”uncle” based on the above evidence:
One idea would be to consider that one’s aunts/uncles sit diagonally from you on a family tree. By this logic, we could incorporate the idea of “across” or “diagonal” into our term. 
Latin offers us “trans” and “oblique”, the former already heavily in use (and giving the diminutive “trannie” which is a big no-no), and the latter sounding odd, and borderline rude (but having the adorable diminutive “oblie”). 
West-Saxon, on the other hand, offers us the word “hyrne” meaning “corner” or “angle”, which actually seems pretty fitting, though “hyrnie” sounds a little too much like “ernie” or “hernia” for my taste...
Another option would be the classic “parent’s sibling” approach
Here, Latin gives us “parent” and “consociate” to work with. “rencon” and “renkie”? “renso” and “rensie”? “parcon” and “parkie”?...
West-Saxon, on the other hand, gives us “olkin” and “olkie” as a shortened form of “old/elder’s kin”. This has a very Anglisch-y feeling to it, but I like that it rolls off the tongue in a similar way to “auntie/uncle”. 
This one may or may not need the “-in-law” additive for spouses, since “kin” somewhat encompasses both “blood” family and “water” family (as in “blood (of the convenant) is thicker than water (of the womb)”), but “olkin-in-law” (or “olkin-law” by haplological processes, possibly eventually leading to one’s “olk” when related by blood) or “olkingif” (if you want to keep Saxon etymology) would still be acceptable
Finally, there’s the option to re-purpose/morph archaic kinship terms:
For Latin: “patruus”, “avunculus”, “amita”, “matertera”
Of these, “avunculus” and “amita” are already now “uncle” and “aunt” respectively. “patruus” and “matertera” have the Latinate roots “patria” and “matria” for mother and father, which we could simply substitute “parent” for, giving us ”parenum” (keeping in mind Latin neuter declensions). 
For West-Saxon: “fædera”, ”faþu”, “eam” and “modrige”
"modrige” (ME “modrie”) and “eam” (ME “eme”/”eem”) are still in dialectical use, and  “fædera” and ”faþu” have too much of “father” in them. However, a portmanteau of the former two would be “emodrie”, which could be a fitting option I suppose?
Of these, I suppose my favorites in descending order are “hyrne”, “emodrie”, and “olkin”.
Summary (copypasted from tl;dr at the top): I propose one of the following terms as a gender-neutral alternative for “aunt/uncle” in English:
“hyrne”/”hyrnie” meaning “corner” in West-Saxon/Old English (indicating the diagonal relationship one has to their hyrne). 
Alternately, “oblique”/”oblie” from Latin, having essentially the same meaning. 
“emodrie” as a portmanteau of “eme” and “mordie”, each an archaic Middle English term that refers to one’s maternal sibling. 
Alternately, some version of “parenum”/“parennie” (options include “renum”/“rennie”, “rena”/“rennie”, “ren”/”ren-ren”, etc.) from Latin “parent” and modeling after unused “patruus” (father’s brother) and “matertera” (mother’s sister)
“olkin” as a portmeanteau of “elder” (”old”) and “kin” from West-Saxon
Alternately, some version of “parent consociate” from Latin
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