OK, here's what I have. The conculture is called the Baxaino, and they speak Old Baxaidžes for right now. The abbreviations are taken from
here and supplemented as follows:
- My system needs to differentiate between a male and a female ego; I use Em and Ef here respectively at the expense of introducing case sensitivity.
- The asterisk should be interpreted as a Kleene star: the preceding character can appear any number of times from zero to infinity.
I'm still thinking of words for husband and wife. Conservative Baxaino thought is supposed to align with our Western ideas and condemn sex with anyone other than your actual spouse adulterous. A clan leader
MAY, depending on time and place, allow a man to have sex with his wife's sister—there isn't supposed to be any hard and fast rule about this other than the leaders' opinions about morality. Sex and marriage within the clan is considered incestuous and illegal (you always belong to your mother's clan).
As the Baxaino are organized into clans, not families, the nuclear family as our Western culture understands it is generally not recognized, but there's a way to differentiate between lineal and collateral relatives if it's necessary: For a lineal relative, prefix the kinship word given with /paj/; for a collateral relative, prefix it instead with /ɣɛb/. (I'm considering giving them literal meanings of "birth" and "side" respectively). What we think of as our mother, then, is specifically our /pajθiŋɡa/
pajthingga, and her sister is our /ɣɛbθinga/
ghèbthingga.
What do you think?
Edited to add: I just realized that the words for "father" and "uncle" both end in
ko. Maybe treat
dzako and
ghòtko as compounds and assign individual meanings to
dza,
ghòt, and
ko? (Sorry, their language and culture are still being worked on.