Do you have a jiubiaoxiong? There is a good chance you have, but perhaps weren't aware of it. The Chinese use this word for ‘my mother's brother's son who is older than I am’.

How far can kinship terms go?

When it comes to kinship words, English is fairly meagre. Your uncle and aunt can be on your mother's side or your father's. Grandparents fall in the same ambiguous category. A cousin is a cousin, without giving the side of the family or the cousin's sex. The words ‘nephew’ and ‘niece’ give the sex but not the lineage. In addition, your aunt's husband is almost automatically called your uncle, although he is not, just as your blood-related uncle's wife becomes your aunt for lack of anything else to call her.

When it comes to kinship systems, there are several types, first devised in 1871 by the American ethnologist and anthropologist Louis Henry Morgan and further refined by many others. Morgan first classified kinship systems into two main groups: classificatory and descriptive. In the simplest of terms, an example of the classificatory type is ‘grandparent’, while an example of the descriptive type has separate words for ‘father's mother’, ‘father's father’, ‘mother's mother’, ‘mother's father’ and so on.

Morgan then proceeded to divide each of the two main groups into sub-systems, depending on how various peoples viewed their relations.

FROM SIMPLE…

One of the simplest of all is the ‘Hawaiian model’, which is of the classificatory type.

In this kinship system, there are no uncles or aunts, and no cousins.