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SWMBO and MILWMBO - poor, poor CapK


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In reply to:

and is there a term for cousin not in the same gereration?

my father's family is 'fractured'


I think saudara/i would be used for people who are more or less your own age, and for much older cousins you would use om or tante, but that's just a feeling. It's as much a question of etiquette as language and quite possibly varies from ethnic group to ethnic group.

Bingley



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SWMBO and MILWMBO - poor, poor CapK

Thanks Bel. I just feel so - endangered! [running and hiding -e]



The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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parents'-in-law for the the whole bunch of in-laws on either side. Writing of course, kinda awkward to say "parentses!"
So why not "all the in-laws" and skip parents?
Or is that too easy?






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what am I missing here, guys? We have a description (a noun phrase) with the form ~in-law, with the stem varied by wether it is singular or plural. But in both cases the possessive suffix is surely 's. Or is that all much too simple?


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Well somewhere in all the posts up there you will see where we ran into a conundrum Mav.

You say "my mother-in-law's house in nice" because the whole term 'mother-in-law' is the noun BUT If mother-in-law is really a noun then why isn't it mother-in-laws (instead of mothers-in-law) when referring to the mom on both sides of the family. And is it mothers-in-law's houses or mother-in-laws' houses.

And when you refer to both parents on both sides it becomes an unweildy mouthful (leave that one alone dear - people are sensitive these days and after that whole Bingley size of fig-leaf debacle, well, nuff said)



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why isn't it mother-in-laws...

yeahbut®

that's exactly what I do say. One MIL, 2 MILs, and even with the benefits of modern marriage 3 or more MILs

imho, Mothers-in-law is pedantic and tastes wrong.

No problemo!


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and what also occurs to me, reading this again, is that it is partly a question as mentioned above of the compaction effect over time: whilst your proposal woud have been fine in the days when we were first talking about 'mother' qualified by legal status, I would argue we now universally talk about muthrinlaw - it's in effect one word.


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Cuñado=brother of your spouse
Cuñada=sister of your spouse
Pay attention, this is where it gets tricky-
Concuño=husband of your spouse's sister
Concuña=wife of your spouse's brother


OK, consuelo, but what about the spouse of your brother/sister? I've always found it odd that English doesn't have a seperate word for that relationship.


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We do Flatlander. The spouse of your brother is your sister-in-law, and the spouse of your sister is your brother-in-law.

Were you, perhaps, talking about the siblings of your brother(or sister)-in-law? There is no 'one' word to describe these people, well, "strangers" if you really don't know them.




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