Edward Sapir’s “Kinship Terms of the Kootenay Indians” is a short technical paper in Americanist linguistics and ethnology, published in 1916 and drawn from a single session of fieldwork. Its data came from Paul David, an elderly Kootenay chief—Ganq’u’skle, “red horns”—who was in Ottawa that May on government business for his tribe. What Sapir gathered in that interview he set down as a numbered vocabulary of relationship terms, then analyzed for the principles of sex and reciprocity that organize them.
The Vocabulary and Its Two Columns
Sapir opens with a note on method. The transcription follows the standard phonetic system then in use among Americanists, with the voiced stops (b, d, g) to be read as intermediates; the recurring ga- is simply the first-person singular possessive prefix, “my.” Paul David gave no separate vocative forms—the possessed terms themselves served for address, so ga-d’to, “my father” (said by a male speaker), was also used to call out “father!” A brief set of etymological conjectures follows: -dit’o and -dife look alike but are probably unrelated; several stems are reduplicated; -cwm may connect with its reciprocal -co; -tea and -tci’ya are surely related; and the terms ending in -natkl are built on other terms in the list. Sapir admits that his ignorance of Kootenay morphology stops him from analyzing the plainly derivative forms at the end of the list.
The list itself runs to thirty-one numbered terms, sorted into columns for a male speaker, either sex, and a female speaker. Some entries are startlingly broad: one term covers grandmother and grandfather on either side, grandchild, daughter-in-law, father-in-law, and a sister’s son’s wife. Others are narrow—separate words for older and younger brother, older and younger sister. The vocabulary reaches out to in-laws, step-relations, and finally to “cousin or any remote relative of recognized blood,” with a last term for a remote relative whose exact degree of kinship was not known.
Sex and Reciprocity as Organizing Principles
Two principles, Sapir argues, shape this vocabulary. The first is the sex of the speaker: certain relationships take one term from a man and another from a woman—father, grandmother and granddaughter, younger brother, brother’s son and daughter, sister’s son and daughter, father- and mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother- and sister-in-law. But Sapir is careful to say the principle is applied without “complete rigor or symmetry.” Only about a dozen terms are exclusively male or exclusively female; the rest stretch across both sexes, and the pattern is marked by “irregularity and criss-crossing.”
The second principle is reciprocity, the use of a single term by both parties to a relationship. Sapir’s analysis turns on where reciprocity holds and where it breaks down. The uncle terms are used reciprocally for a man’s brother’s or sister’s child—but the aunt terms are not: all four aunt–nephew/niece possibilities are kept distinct. The grandparent–grandchild term covers every reciprocal pairing except two females; a single term covers all parent-in-law and child-in-law relations except a daughter-in-law. The sex of the connecting relative, Sapir notes, is ignored everywhere except in the uncle–nephew/niece set.
Marriage Customs Read from Words
The paper’s most interesting claim concerns the partial confusion of blood kinship with kinship by marriage. A man’s granddaughter and his daughter-in-law share a term; a woman’s grandfather and her father-in-law likewise. Sapir explains the in-law usages as teknonymy: a woman speaks of her parents-in-law through her children—her father-in-law is her child’s grandfather—and the reverse usages follow by analogy. Other overlaps, where a father’s brother shares a term with a mother’s or father’s sister’s husband, may point to the customary exchange of siblings in marriage, two men each marrying the other’s sister; or they may reflect nothing more than a feeling for symmetrical patterning. The near-identity of a woman’s terms for her sister’s children with those for her son and daughter suggests the levirate in reverse—a widower marrying his dead wife’s sister, making her sister’s children her own potential stepchildren. Yet “identical” cousins are apparently not classed as brothers and sisters, a limit on how far the marriage explanation can run. Distinct terms for in-laws after a death, and the paper’s closing note from the Geological Survey in Ottawa, round off a study whose interest lies in what a careful listener can hear of social custom in a handful of words.
