Kinship Terminology

Abstract Korowai kinship nouns are a class of nouns with two characteristics. First, they have plural forms, whereas other Korowai nouns do not have plural forms. Second, they can be glossed in terms of the English nouns for relationships in the nuclear family (‘father/mother, son/daughter, brother/ sister, husband/wife’).1 This use of genealogical glosses needs to be qualified. First, not all meanings of kinship terms can be glossed genealogically (see Bean 1981). The Korowai term ni ‘mother’, for example, is also used in the following ways: ‘wife’, ‘woman’, ‘Mrs.’, part of the proper names of females, and part of the expression for ‘coward’. Some of such nonkinship uses in Korowai are described below, Nonkinship expressions. Second, the status of the genealogical glosses is suspect because their use is based on the questionable assumption that the words for ‘mother’ and similar terms in all languages share a cross-cultural genealogical component of meaning (see Schneider 1984).