"Merry Christmas from the Family", a country song by Robert Earl Keen, tells the tale of a festive get-together. Many listeners will recognize the chaos(混乱) the singer describes; even more than that, they will definitely identify with his struggle to recall how he is related to the various guests. "Fred and Rita drove from Harlingen," Mr. Keen sings, "Can't remember how I'm kin (有亲属关系的) to them."
That may have something to do with the English language. It is often joked that anyone around your age is a "cousin" and anyone older is an "uncle" or "aunt". English is rather bare in its terms for family members. Other languages pay far more attention to the details.
Take "brother" and "sister" for instance. Societies that value age-order highly often have different terms for older brother, older sister, younger brother and younger sister. These are ge, jie, di and mei in Chinese or ani, ane, ototo, imoto in Japanese.
Chinese even requires the speakers to remember whether a relative is older or younger than they are, whether relatives of their parents are older or younger than they, and so on. There are many armchair theories about the relationship between language and culture that do not hold up to careful examination. The East Asian languages' focus on seniority(年长), however, is actually related to the importance Confucianism places on the virtue of respecting your elders.
Actually, all languages permit you to describe relationships in any amount of de tail your listener would like. The focus that some cultures put on labelling every possible relation with a distinct term does not mean that those who lack those terms do not pay attention to family networks. Every English-speaking family seems to have at least one member who can sort out the complicated relations and tell you that Henry Ford was a great-great-great uncle. But each family also has members who couldn't care less, waving a hand and saying "uncle" or "cousin".
