¹ C. C. Wu, The Chinese family, AA 29.316–25 (1927); T. S. Chen and J. K. Shryock, Chinese relationship terms, AA 34.623–69 (1932) ; Alfred L. Kroeber, Process in the Chinese kinship system, AA 35.151–7 (1933) ; H. Y. Feng, Teknonymy as a formative factor in the Chinese kinship system, AA 38.59–66 (1936); id., The Chinese kinship system, HJAS 2.141–275 (1937); Paul K. Benedict, Tibetan and Chinese kinship terms, HJAS 6.313–37 (1942) ; Joseph H. Greenberg, The logical analysis of kinship, Philosophy of science 16.58–64 (1949). Though the last article does not deal specifically with Chinese kinship systems, it opens up possibilities for reducing complicated kinship relations to a rigorous postulational treatment.

² For a brief statement about the National Romanization used here, see Lg. 29.381 (1953). A dot before a syllable indicates the neutral tone, or atonicity; a circle indicates optional neutral tone.

³ In this paper the terms prefix and suffix apply to any very actively used bound morphemes occurring initially or finally in morpheme sequences.

⁴ According to the traditional dictionaries, the word in the sense of ‘excellent’ should have the second tone (ling); but this pronunciation is nearly obsolete.

⁵ The symbolological and legal status of a proper name is the character as it is written, rather than the spoken word as it is pronounced. In English also, Carl and Karl, Thomson and Thompson are different names.

⁶ The literal translations given here for compounds are always in terms of the meanings of the parts at the level at which they are compounded. In its original use, shyh was applied to warriors and aristocrats; but in the compound neushyh it has the meaning ‘scholar’, with a slight aristocratic overtone.

⁷ In this sense the form tzonq is considered better than tsorng in that it agrees better with the traditional dictionaries and is still used.

⁸ The spelling fuw ‘wife, woman’ is adopted for the nonce to distinguish this word from fuh ‘father’ or ‘of father's generation’.

⁹ Not to be confused with chi-tzyy ‘wife and children’.

¹⁰ Not to be confused with laopor.tz or laoporl ‘an old woman’.

¹¹ The reading pronunciation for the character for older sister or female cousin is tzyy, used only in the collective tzyy.mey, which means either ‘sisters’ or ‘sisters and brothers’ (cf. German Geschwister). Here the pronunciation jiee is preferred.

¹² Not to be confused with laotaypor or laoporl ‘an old woman’ or with lao.por ‘wife’ (cf. fn. 10). In the Szechwan dialects, however, laotaypor is a deferential term like ‘elderly lady’, usable as a vocative. It was the cause of frequent misunderstandings when during the 1940's elderly ladies from the lower Yangtze provinces moved west and were often so addressed.

¹³ That is from the point of sound only. There are 1279 distinguishable (actual) syllables in Mandarin and, eliminating unusable combinations which are homophonous with ‘bad egg’, ‘damn fool’, ‘goodbye’, there will be around one million usable forms. Differentiating homophonous morphemes will of course yield a much larger number.