!NOTE THE ONLY OC OF MINEI S ATLAS!
!ROCKET - DA green one ROXIE - da biting one AND ACE - Da being bitten one BELONG TO @lilmissrandom4607!
There is a reason Atlas will never have children. Too emotional.
I mean look at them. Crying because snuggles. (tho its more they were chosen to snuggle by Rocket so.. Yeah.)
(if another term works better, use that. you can invent words that feel gender neutral or just right to you. if you are wondering about different words, just message me. i will reply as soon as i can.)
So I’ve been thinking about gender neutral terms for aunt/uncle. Pibling just sounds bad, auncle is to close to uncle, especially verbally. I suggest aubling, for aunt/uncle & sibling; the same way that nibling is niece/nephew & sibling. Short forms could be auble or aubby.
So currently my brain is stuck on the names of familial relationships and how they could be made more systematic.
Buckle up for a long rambly post that you will gain nothing from reading after the fold.
I started with the inverse of the “nibling” (gender-neutral alternative to niece/nephew) relationship and wondered if there was a word for it. I found “pibling” (short for “parent sibling”).
Sure, it works, but I find it weird that a relationship to a (usually) older relative sounds so diminutive. But then I was thinking about how “great aunt/uncle” is used (I know some people say “grand aunt/uncle”, but I don’t), skipping over grand (e.g. great grandparent). Which means aunt/uncle basically get the “grand” included.
Well, what are they the “grand” version of? Well, “sibling”. So aunt basically means “grandsister” and uncle “grandbrother”. So a pibling could be called a grandsibling, making your great aunt also your great grandsibling.
But now we have a new problem, which is that if we extend nibling the same way, like how your child’s child’s child is your great grandchild, your nibling’s child is your great grandnibling, now the number of greats is off by one.
For example, your sibling’s child’s child is your grandnibling, but you are their parent’s parent’s sibling, making you their great grandnibling.
That makes me wish that there were a way to modify sibling directly to go down a generation rather than needing a separate word for a sibling plus a generation down the tree.
Well, what’s the opposite of grand? Terrible? That doesn’t seem like a good idea. Grand can also mean very big, so how about tiny? Maybe it also sounds potentially rude, but consider this: great and grand both mean similar things and start with the same letter. What can we prefix tiny with for a similar effect? Let me introduce: “teeny tiny”.
So instead of your grandparent calling you their grandchild, they call you their tinychild. And your children? Their teeny tinychildren. And their children? Of course that’s their teeny teeny tinychildren.
So it might be dumb, but it’s also hilarious and very cute.
So that bring’s us back to the nibling/pibling relationship from the start. Now nibling becomes tinysibling, and pibling becomes grandsibling. And your great aunt is now your great grandsibling, and you are her teeny tinysibling.
The final question to ask is, “Is this system better?” And the answer is a resounding no. Is it plausible to get people to adopt? Another resounding no. But, and this is the real killer question: is it funnier? Hell yeah.
With Thanksgiving today, everyone is visiting family. Cousins and Aunts and Uncles and Niblings and Piblings and Grandparents all crowd at a table or two and eat and talk and whatever.
I have a big family that only keeps growing, my mom has 8 siblings, I have 17 maternal first cousins and who knows how many second cousins. But I used to think my family was fairly average, the people I grew up around had families of the same and much larger magnitude. Slowly I have realized that my family is huge, especially when I read that the average (British) person has 5 first cousins, 28 second cousins, and 175 third cousins. (I’m not British, but my point still stands)
The thing is, compared to my friends, my family is small. It makes me wonder what “a lot” of cousins would be here.
I think the reason that most nonbinary terms sound odd is because they are not made by linguists or they are made by linguists using Celtic. For example pibling as aunt/uncle. I think the best alternatives that I have heard are Avaun (from Latin which a lot of our word come from) and Entle (which was made by looking at the words Aunt and Uncle and using a new consonant and combing the ends) so if anyone has found a gender neutral word for neice/nephew that would be great
