Chinese Kinship Calculator
Chinese kinship is descriptive where English is classificatory. English has one word for cousin; Chinese has eight, and which one you use records whose line you descend from, whether you share a surname, and who is older. Build a path from yourself and this works out the term, the English rendering, and the footnote that carries what the English drops.
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Four systems, kept apart
A wuxia character can stand in four different relations to another, and English has to keep them apart:
- Blood — Uncle, Brother, Sister.
- Lineage, within a martial school — shibo, shixiong, shimei, kept in pinyin.
- Oath — sworn father, sworn brother.
- Allied family (世交) — House Uncle, House Brother, House Sister. The head word House is not optional: a bareUncle Zha reads as a blood uncle, which is the one thing 世 does not mean.
What the English drops
Blood kinship renders in plain English, so these distinctions travel in a footnote instead of the term. Each is information the Chinese sentence carried and the English one does not.
- 伯父 bófù — 'Uncle' destroys the 伯/叔 seniority split, which governs precedence in a clan scene.
- 姑母 gūmǔ — 'Aunt' merges 姑, 姨, 婶 and 舅母.
- 舅父 jiùfù — 'Uncle' merges 伯, 叔, 舅, 姑父 and 姨父.
- 嫂子 sǎozi — 'Sister-in-law' merges 嫂子, 弟媳 and the spouse's sisters into one word, across generations.
- 侄子 zhízi — 'Nephew' merges 侄 with 甥 and erases the surname line.
- 堂兄 tángxiōng — 'Cousin' erases the line, the seniority and the shared surname at once.
- 表兄 biǎoxiōng — Marriage to a 表 cousin was permissible where 堂 was incest, so the distinction can carry a plot.
- 外祖父 wàizǔfù — 外 marks the mother's line as outside the clan — a judgement English cannot carry.
What this tool does not do
It resolves the structural term — the one the family tree licenses. It cannot tell you what a character actually says. Speakers reach for a more senior term to flatter, a familiar one to disarm, and a pointedly formal one to wound, and a translator has to read the scene for that. Where relative age decides between two terms and the path cannot supply it, the tool shows both rather than guessing.