Piedmontese 2: the family map

The structure of the family as mapped by a language is also an extremely interesting source of information about social behaviour in a culture. Since many people seem to have like my previous quick how-to, here you get a follow up.

An heavily context depended set of mind obviously produced different naming conventions, depending on the position of the viewer. So we start from the social titles. This is the way in which we address people belonging to external families. It's basically our system of public social titles.

A word about granularity

You'll immediately notice the enormous difference in granularity. Women have developed a very complex hierarchical system, while men have not. My take is that a number of factors had a concurrent role in this.

One may want to read this as a sign of simple male dominance. Men are either kids or adults, while the social role of women is stated in fine grain, it depends on their position in the reproductive cycle and it allows no freedom whatsoever. This is a possible reading of this map, and surely such factors existed and contributed in making it. Yet there is also another extremely relevant factor.

Males' average life expectancy has been much shorter than women's, for centuries. At the peak of the religious violence it went nowhere higher than 20-25 years, for over a century. This is well confirmed by a very simple fact: although theoretically existing in the language (and nowadays used) the word for male widow (vìdov) is never met in our literature up to the last century, while female widows (vìdova) come in flocks everywhere. Also, our popular culture is full of satirical songs about the problems met by young guys married to rich older widows, which seems to be another mark reinforcing a very different life expectancy for the two sexes.

In such conditions males did not really need an elaborate social scale: they simply had no time to use it anyway. They were born to become fighters as soon as possible, reproduce quickly and then die. After that, as the popular say goes, they would eat salad from the end of its roots (mangé salada da la ponta dël tross).

Another factor confirming this reading of the scale may be the fact that the traditional dress for male kids in religious functions is... a military uniform (yet this is obviously subject to a number of possible interpretations). Nowadays this is a lost tradtion, but it was still very well in existence just some 50 years ago.

I'm not claiming males' short life to be the one and only factor behind the self-evident difference in granularity between the two sexes. I simply wish to point out that terminology in a language is a by-product of centuries and often millennia of real life, so when one claims a single factor to be there things often turn out to be much more complex than that.

Later on you'll see that some of the words used to define internal family relations come straight from the Longobard language, as it must have been evolved somewhere on the Baltic coasts a couple of thousands years ago. Moreover, the Longobard terminology retains even nowadays a lot of its external social meaning.

This is not a surprise, if you come to think about it. Technology changes, craft related terminology evolves almost on daily base, but families are and remain families, so this is a nice place to look for fossils, just in any culture.

Okay, this post has got pretty long. For today it's enough. I'll have more details tomorrow.