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.
Build a path
Read it left to right: each step moves from the last person to the next.
What English loses
These are the distinctions that vanish when a kinship term is translated rather than transliterated. Each one is information the Chinese sentence carried and the English one does not.
- 祖父 zǔfù — Bare 'grandfather' merges 祖父 and 外祖父.
- 祖母 zǔmǔ — As above.
- 外祖父 wàizǔfù — 外 marks the mother's line as outside the agnatic clan — a judgement English cannot carry.
- 外祖母 wàizǔmǔ — As above.
- 孙子 sūnzi — 'Grandson' merges 孙 and 外孙.
- 孙女 sūnnǚ — As above.
- 外孙 wàisūn — 外 again marks the non-agnatic line.
- 外孙女 wàisūnnǚ — As above.
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.
Lineage terms of address within a martial school — shifu, shixiong, shibo and the rest — are a separate system built on this one. Seeshimen for those.