I Never Knew There Was a Word for It - Adam Jacot De Boinod [20]
One cure for adultery
Rhaphanidosis was a punishment meted out to adulterous men by cuckolded husbands in Ancient Greece. It involved inserting a radish up their backside.
An avuncular solution
The Western ideal of a monogamous husband and wife is not universal. There is, for example, no word for father in Mosuo (China). The nearest translation for a male parental figure is axia, which means friend or lover; and while a child will have only one mother, he or she might have a sequence of axia. An axia has a series of nighttime trysts with a woman, after which he returns home to his mother. Any children resulting from these liaisons are raised in the woman’s household. There are no fathers, husbands or marriages in Mosuo society. Brothers take care of their sisters’ children and act as their fathers. Brothers and sisters live together all their lives in their mothers’ homes.
Polygamy on ice
Other societies replace the complexities of monogamy with those of polygamy, as, for example, the Inuit of the Arctic:
angutawkun a man who exchanges wives with another man or one of the men who have at different times been married to the same woman
areodjarekput to exchange wives for a few days only, allowing a man sexual rights to his woman during that period
nuliinuaroak sharing the same woman; more specifically, the relationship between a man and his wife’s lover when the husband has not consented to the arrangement
False friends
dad (Albanian) wet nurse or babysitter
babe (SiSwati, Swaziland) father or minister
mama (Georgian) father
brat (Russian) brother
parents (Portuguese) relatives
loo (Fulani, Mali) storage pot
bang (Albanian) paper bag
sin (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian) son
Special relations
Whether it’s because they have big families, time on their hands in large empty spaces, or for another reason, the Sami people of Northern Scandinavia have highly specific terms for family members and relationships: goaski are one’s mother’s elder sisters, and sivjjot is one’s older sister’s husband; one’s mother’s younger sisters are muotta and one’s father’s younger sisters are siessa; one’s mother’s brothers are eanu and her brothers’ wives are ipmi; one’s brother’s wife is a mangi. The nearby Swedes exhibit a similar subtlety in their terms for grandfathers and grandmothers: farfar is a father’s father, morfar is a mother’s father, farmor is a father’s mother and mormor is a mother’s mother.
This pattern of precise names for individual family members had a parallel in an older society. Latin distinguished patruus (father’s brother) from avunculus (mother’s brother); and matertera (father’s sister) from amita (mother’s sister).
Of even earlier origins, the Australian Kamilaroi nganuwaay means a mother’s cross-cousin’s daughter and also a mother’s father’s sister’s daughter as well as a mother’s mother’s brother’s daughter’s daughter as well as a mother’s mother’s brother’s son’s daughter.
Tahitian taio
Meanwhile, in the warm climate of Tahiti, the word taio (Maohi, French Polynesia) means a formal friendship between people not related by ancestors, which involves the sharing of everything, even sex partners. A taio relationship can be male-to-male, female-to-female or male-to-female.
Essential issue
Language testifies to the importance most cultures attach to having children, as well as the mixed emotions the little darlings bring with them. Yiddish, for example, details both extremes of the parental experience, nakhes being the mixture of pleasure and pride a parent gets from a child, and tsuris the grief and trouble:
izraf (Persian) producing ingenious, witty children
niyoga (Hindi) the practice of appointing