Kinship Terms in Nepali Language and its Morphology

Abstract

Kinship relations are blood relations or those relations which are created naturally. Kinship is a method of acknowledging relations and it is a social bond initiated by blood or genetic as well as marriage. Kinship is important in all cultures and in all human interaction. Kinship is important to anthropology because anthropology is the study of human behaviour and human behaviour is variable. According to M.Lamp[12] to understand fully the nature of kinship systems it is necessary to understand what kind of linguistic elements these are, and what kind of linguistic relationships. The kinship terminology of any language is a natural meeting point for the disciplines of anthropology and linguistics [6]. Like other languages of the world, Nepali kinship terms are also common for Nepali Language. Nepali 1 or Nepalese (नपाली ) is a language in the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It takes its root from Sanskrit, the classical language of India. This paper explores the area of kinship terms in Nepali language, and its outlines the standard kinship relations, associated set of terms in the language. The formations of such terms are also elaborated with grammatical analysis. Kinship terms form a considerable part of the WordNet in any language because the kinship terms interacts each other with different relational characteristics of WordNet. Nepali is a morphologically rich language and Kinship terms form an important aspect in morphology of Nepali Language. There are many number of morphological studies in Nepali but most of them are descriptive in nature. Morphology of Nepali has not yet been fully analyzed from computational perspective.