There can be scarcely any doubt that the terms for relationships are,
in their origin, terms of address. “The American Indians,” says
Mr. Morgan, “always speak to each other, when related, by the term
of relationship, and never by the personal name of the individual
addressed.”[471] From a psychological point of view, it would, indeed,
be surprising if it could be shown that primitive men, in addressing
all the different members of their family or tribe, took into
consideration so complicated a matter as the degree of consanguinity.
Can we really believe that a savage whose intelligence, perhaps, was so
deficient that he was scarcely able to count his own fingers, applied
the same term to his cousins as to his brothers, because he was not
certain whether, after all, they were not his brothers and that, when
he did make a distinction between them, he did so _because_ they were
begotten by different fathers? Facts show that savages generally
denominate their kindred according to much simpler principles, the
names being given chiefly with reference to sex and age, as also to the
external or social, relationship in which the speaker stands to the
person whom he addresses.
In every language there are different designations for persons of
different sexes. In the rudest system of nomenclature, the Hawaiian,
father and other kinsmen of the same generation are called “makua
kana;” mother, mother’s sisters, father’s sisters, &c., “makua
waheena,” “kana” and “waheena” being the terms for male and female.
A son is called “kaikee kana,” a daughter “kaikee waheena,” whilst
“kana” alone is applied to husband, husband’s brother, and sister’s
husband, and “waheena” to wife, wife’s sister, brother’s wife, &c.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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