Kinship Terms in Turkish and Croatian

Abstract

Significant changes have occurred in the system of kinship terminology in the Croatian standard language over the past fifty years. The traditional terms svak ‘sister’s husband’, svastika ‘wife’s sister’, djever ‘husband’s brother’, zaova ‘husband’s sister’, šurjak ‘wife’s brother’, pašanac ‘husband of second sister in relation to husband of first sister’, and jetrva ‘wife of husband’s brother’ have been almost completely replaced by the German loanwords šogor ‘brother-in-law’ and šogorica ‘sister-in-law’. In addition, the semantic field of the term zet (zet : šogor) has, due to interference with the loan-word šogor, been reduced to the meaning ‘daughter’s husband in relation to her parents’. As a result, it has become more difficult for Croatian students of Turkish to learn the vocabulary relating to non-blood relationships. In the Turkish language, terms denoting kinship, including kinship through marriage, are extremely specific because native speakers of the language place great importance on social and kinship relations. It is also difficult for Croatian-speaking students to learn the Turkish terms because the two languages’ systems of kinship terms are very different. Turkish has retained the cognate model, which stresses both lines of relations – via the father and via the mother, and so Turkish has special terms for relations to the gr andfather, the grandmother, and aunts not only on the father’s side, but on the mother’s side as well. Croatian has retained this distinction only in the words stric ‘father’s brother’ and ujak ‘mother’s brother’; Turkish, of course, makes this distinction as well. For contrastive purposes, it is also relevent to mention that in Turkish one can differentiate between siblings in terms of their age: older and younger brother; older and younger sister. In addition, in Turkish, sex can be additionally stressed with the lexemes erkek ‘male’ and kız ‘female’ in cases when the referent’s natural sex is not obvious to the speakers, as is the case with the word torun ‘grandchild’. It is interesting to note that it is not necessary to specify sex with the word for ‘older brother’ (ağabey), but that it is necessary with the word meaning ‘younger brother/sister’ (kardeş) if the speaker wants to stress whether he is talking about a brother or sister.