hello! do you know of a handy chart or reference for keeping track of which word for uncle/aunt a person would be depending on side of family they're from and relation to you?
I’m too tired to proofread so if you see a mistake please point them out. Click on them to see the clear pics.
[Notes:]
* these are typically northern Chinese terminologies.
** They use of “a-” in front of something like “a-die” like “A-Cheng” is regional. From what I understand this is typically a southern Chinese practice.
Bolded = modern & historical times
Highlighted = ONLY used in modern times aka 20th century and afterwards.
Use name = in conversation with someone one younger than you, don’t typically use the relationship term, just call them by their name. The addresses are really used for those older than you as a sign of respect. This is particularly true for modern times.
All uncles and aunts and cousins and brothers and sisters are typically paired with the # they are in the fam [da, er, san, si, wu] (1-5).
Edit: y’all when i say “paternal” cousins I mean cousins that share your last name, if your cousin doesn’t share your last name, that’s a maternal cousin.
ADDENDUM:
OKAY FOR THE COUSINS
The chart was going to get too long, so I tried to short cut and ended up making it more confusing for people.
When I say “paternal” cousins, yes this means cousins on your dad side of the family. But your father’s sisters’ kids, who are technically your paternal cousins, do not share your last name, so don’t use “tang”, use “biao”.
Thank you so much for putting this together!
Quick question, if you don’t mind answering! Is it linguistically sound to mix these terms up for same-gender relationships? So, for example, to refer to your younger brother’s husband as di'fu or your mother’s brother’s husband as, I guess, also jiu'fu, or informally as jiu'die?
Also, I’m not asking you to make a list because this is an amazingly informative source already, but are there terms you would use to refer to your spouse’s family with? Like, is there a special term of address for your wife’s brother, or do you just use their name?
Hi friend, sorry it was like 4 am and I forgot to put an addendum for why there is no same sex terms in the original list.
Technically speaking they don’t exist in the chinese langauge, but luckily the chinese language is pretty much just putting individual characters together based on meaning, so if enough people adopt a certain “term” then it becomes a legitimate part of the language.
So to answer your question, yes it is linguistically sound. I’d be careful with “fu” because there are three different fus
Below are some of the “technically made up but grammatically correct” terms I’ve used (self-coined) for same sex partners.
Older Brother’s Husband: 兄夫 xiong’fu (this fu = husband) Younger Brother’s Husband:弟夫 di’fu (like with its hetero counterpart, this term is only really relevant for third person narration, like if you’re talking about your younger brother’s husband. Because to their face, you can just call them by name, since they are technically “lower” than yourself in the familial hierarchy.)
Older sister’s wife:姐妇 jie’fù . ( this fu = married women or wife). Older sister’s husband 姐夫 jie’fū sounds almost identical. While the intonation on the two fus are technically different if you were to read each character as its “hard” sound, in colloquial speech, the “fu” is often softened to a “light” sound that gives us an ambiguous intonation fů. So it actually works out quite nicely, methinks.
Young sister’s wife: 妹妇 mei’fù (this fu = married women). Younger sister’s husband 妹夫 mei’fū sounds almost identical. Same reason as above applies here too. (In conversation, just refer to them by name, since they are “lower” in the family hierarchy.)
* Same rules apply to cousin-in-laws, only add “biao” in front of cousins that don’t share your last name, and add “tang” for those who do.
Aunts’ Wives: 姨妇 yifu (maternal aunt’s wife), 姑妇 gufu (paternal aunt’s wife). Same pronunciation rules apply here as for sisters, explained above.
So I’m not completely satisfied with the aunt and uncle’s translations because as they are “the elders” technically a younger person addressing them should have “fu” 父 (father) and “mu” 母 (mother) somewhere in their address term, but if I did that, then it would just mean your blood related uncles and aunts, instead of their husbands and wives. Oh well, you win some you lose some I suppose. :/
If you ever feel like you must be the most unobservant person in the world, remember: I once spent half a year failing to notice that my new favourite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the Ukrainian mafia.
(I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in retrospect, the fact that it was always dead no matter the time of day - I think the busiest I ever saw it was five people, myself included - well, that should have been a tipoff. Also, the waitstaff kept calling me “Mr. Prokopetz”, which I had assumed was just part of the restaurant’s gimmick, but given that “Prokopetz” is a Ukrainian surname, I’m now force to wonder whether they’d thought I was, you know, in the business. I just liked the pierogi!)
What I need to know is how on earth did OP finally realize his favorite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the mafia.
I’d like to say I put together the clues, but in reality, I just showed up one day to find that the place had been indefinitely shut down, and later learned it was because the managers had all been arrested.
What I really want to know is how good the food was?
Excellent, if your tastes run to the “heavy cream and too much garlic” end of the spectrum.
Every crime front I’ve ever eaten at has had completely amazing food, honestly. I am pretty convinced that if you want to open a front, you don’t choose “restaurant” as your front-business unless you have a relative who loves to cook.
It tickles me that this is evidently a sufficiently common experience that people find it relatable. (Seriously, check the notes!) We should write reviews or something.
did I just read the line “every crime front I’ve ever eaten at” with my own two eyes
Look, I went to college and lived my early adulthood in a town whose entire thing was import/export, and we had a lot of restaurants that were suspiciously empty except when they were closed and filled with very serious men in nice clothes.
They were usually run by someone who was about the right age to be some adult’s parents or grandparents, and in the case of the two Korean restaurants matching this description, they didn’t speak English. Universally though, they were very pleased to see customers, very proud of their cooking, and very very interested in keeping us far away from the aforementioned serious men in nice clothes. And despite having huge dining rooms and never having more than a couple customers, they never went out of business.
Also, because I am very, very stupid and sometimes don’t think before I talk, I once said loudly, over the phone, while sitting in one of these places, “Hey! Yeah if you want to meet us, we’re eating at [place]. You know…[place]? You totally know it. The Front, on Warwick st!”
The looks I got from every single employee were amazing and then I left.
We had a corner store/deli-place near our apartment in college. Everyone knew they were in on something and no one cared because they looked out for their customers and their neighborhood as a whole.
They started stocking my favorites because I mentioned them within hearing range once, would tell their “vendors” to move out of the way if we stopped in. I walked a different route home and got harassed one night and they asked after me. When they found out what happened, they declared “Consider it taken care of, you should never be afraid around here.” Never happened again.
Everyone needs their friendly neighborhood crime lord.
This is both my favorite and makes me fondly remember home. Less of the eateries, more of the mysterious retail joints that never seem to close despite no one ever buying anything, though. Well. Aside from the juice bar. Didnt last, though.
I found these places everywhere I lived. My favorite was an omurice place near my home in Japan, and a mother/son officially ran it. The food was incredible, and one night I was there and there was a boisterous crowd of BLATANTLY yakuza men eating and drinking. They started talking to me, and were super nice. Said they wanted to “practice their English,” and paid for my food and drinks and then said they wanted to take me to karaoke. That was a little alarming, but the mother/son, who seriously looked after me as the only foreigner in the area, said I should go, and the son came along. So we piled into a white landboat Cadillac and partied until dawn.
One of the older men at the party took me to my neighborhood and dropped me off out front (the car was literally too big to fit down the small neighborhood streets) and said that I had his blessing.
Which was confusing, but I was drunk, so whatever. Then I went back to the restaurant about a week later and the mother said, “the family approves of you. You may marry our son if you wish and be welcomed.”
I did not marry him, but wow. There were no hard feelings, either. They still helped out if I got harassed by the cops (which happened a lot in these smaller towns with no foreigners) or anything like that.
I have a very similar story about a cuban restaurant that I loved, and would frequently visit after pulling all nighters for cafecito and these amazing breakfast sandwiches. It was only open at ass-crack-of-dawn hours of the morning, while I was always awake, and the guys who owned it and ran was I believed was a cocaine smuggling operation, simply adored me as the half-dead punk college kid that showed up at 4:30 am on a tuesday. Eventually the cops came to my place because they thought I was involved with narcotics and after they searched my apartment and only found my anime convention badges and copy of the D&D players handbook they left with no incident.
The next time I went to the restaurant the guys gave me a free sandwich and this awesome latte. At the time I didn’t think much of it, but in retrospect I think they were thanking me for throwing the cops off their trail by being a huge nerd.
Mob food is the best food! It doesn’t matter what faction, country, or style mob food is always the best food. I’ve been to two fronts that I know were fronts, one was Polish and one was Italian and I have only ever had better sausage from my Great-Grandmother’s kitchen, and a few that I suspect but because I wasn’t with my great-grandfather I couldn’t ask.
