[extropy-chat] cryo cat

[Anders Sandberg]

Spike said:
> Most languages have words specifying the difference
> between mother's parents and father's parents.  English
> has only the generic grandmother and grandfather.  Big
> omission.

Yes, it constantly (?) annoys me. On the other hand, the treatment of
cousins in English is wonderfully simple - the children of siblings are
cousins, their children are second cousins, theirs third cousins and so
on. And for unequal  number of generation we get "Nth cousins Kth
removed".
(http://oakroadsystems.com/genl/relation.htm)

In Sweden we instead have separate (and rather unusual words) for these:
sysslingar for second cousins and bryllingar for third cousins. There is a
very rare series of terms tvåmänningar/tremänningar/fyrmänningar for
second, third and fourth cousins, but it is practically never used. And to
my knowledge no way of doing twice removed relations etc.

Personally I like how gender-free English is - nouns are just nouns, while
in Swedish and many other languages they have genders. The clock is a
'she' while the table is an 'it' (but not the same kind of 'it' as a
chair). And if you forget which genus it is, the adjectives in the
sentence get the wrong endings. Messy and especially illogical. Sometimes
it is very good not to include a language feature.


-- 
Anders Sandberg
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa
http://www.aleph.se/andart/

The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more.