Indo-european Kinship Terminologies in Europe: Trajectories of Change

This is a study of kin terms and kinship terminologies in Indo-European (IE) languages. There is, of course, no shortage of such studies already (e.g. Delbrück 1889, Hocart 1928, Galton 1957, Friedrich 1966, Szemerényi 1977, Kullanda 2002), which go back to the nineteenth century. By and large, however, most of them are concerned with reconstructing terms historically, right back to proto-IE, and/or studying specific terminologies or groups of terminologies either synchronically or diachronically or both. Rather less attention has been given to changes in IE languages in Europe generally following the break-up of IE into its component families, which for this article means Baltic, Slavonic, Greek, Latin/Romance and Germanic. The present article seeks to develop understanding of this topic. More specifically, I hypothesise that there has been a trend – starting over two thousand years ago in some cases, but only happening now in others, and not made at all in yet others– for IE terminologies in Europe to shift from a zero-equation pattern (i.e. with separate terms for most kin types) to a cognatic one (in Rodney Needham’s sense of the term, i.e. involving a broad distinction between lineal and collateral relatives, but not among the latter in any generation). 1