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For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures remains incompletely explained. Despite the wealth of kinship data in the anthropological record, comparative studies of kinship terminology are hindered by data accessibility. Here we present Kinbank, a new database of 210,903 kinterms from a global sample of 1,229 spoken languages. Using open-access and transparent data provenance, Kinbank offers an extensible resource for kinship terminology, enabling researchers to explore the rich diversity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns. We illustrate our contribution with two examples. We demonstrate strong gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms across 1,022 languages, and we show that there is no evidence for a coevolutionary relationship between cross-cousin marriage and bifurcate-merging terminology in Bantu languages. Analysing kinship data is notoriously challenging; Kinbank aims to eliminate data accessibility issues from that challenge and provide a platform to build an interdisciplinary understanding of kinship.

This paper proposes a reconstruction of the kinship terminology system of Proto-Tupi-Guarani (PTG). The focus of the contribution lies in presenting a solid core of cognate sets and argumentation for the reconstruction of formal and semantic aspects for each relevant etymon. The etymologies are preceded by a review of our current understanding of PTG kinship terms and by a selective overview of those aspects of PTG structure that will play out more importantly in the proposed etyma. Finally, we end by considering a few open issues in the reconstruction of the PTG kinship system, many of which are raised here for the first time, and by addressing its characteristics in relation to traditional typologies of these terminology systems.

Resumo Este estudo explora o sistema de terminologia de parentesco da língua Proto-Tupí-Guaraní (PTG) a partir de uma perspectiva interdisciplinar, que soma contribuições da Etnologia, da Linguística Histórica e dos trabalhos etnográficos realizados com povos Tupí-Guaraní. Fazem-se inferências sobre pré-história cultural utilizando métodos filogenéticos comparativos, um conjunto de ferramentas computacionais para explorar mudanças evolutivas em populações relacionadas, aplicados a um banco de dados de termos de parentesco em 24 línguas Tupí-Guaraní. Discute-se a amostra usada no estudo, os procedimentos de codificação adotados para dados tipológicos e os componentes, valores iniciais e premissas do modelo evolutivo. A análise de reconstrução de estados ancestrais baseada no critério de máxima parcimônia reconstrói vários traços tipológicos do sistema de parentesco do PTG, como: fusão e bifurcação na primeira geração ascendente (+1); distinções na terminologia de irmãos baseadas na idade relativa e no sexo do ego; e equação terminológica entre irmãos e primos paralelos. O estudo avalia o estado atual da reconstrução de formas linguísticas para termos de parentesco em PTG e mapeia estas formas no sistema inferido por análise comparativa. Este estudo de comprovação de conceito demonstra a utilidade de análise filogenética para inferir estruturas de sistemas de parentesco em comunidades linguísticas ancestrais.

Abstract: This paper explores the diachrony of the verbal person marking system across the large and structurally diverse Tupian language family. I argue that the historical development of these different patterns are best informed by analyzing their synchronic distributions with regard to the current evolutionary hypotheses on the family. I apply a parsimony reconstruction model across the topology of two different classifications and compare the results with what is known from traditional historical linguistic work. This study is able to provide support for previous claims about the family and also generates a number of additional hypotheses about the intermediate stages of development of these patterns.

Abstract: In this paper we present the first results of the application of computational methods, inspired by the ideas in McMahon & McMahon (2005), to a dataset collected from languages of every branch of the Tupian family (including all living non-Tupí-Guaraní languages) in order to produce a classification of the family based on lexical distance. We used both a Swadesh list (with historically stabler terms) and a list of animal and plant names for results comparison. In addition, we also selected more (HiHi) and less (LoLo) stable terms from the Swadesh list to form sublists for indepedent treatment. We compared the resulting NeighborNet networks and neighbor-joining cladograms and drew conclusions about their significance for the current understanding of the classification of Tupian languages. One important result is the lack of support for the currently discussed idea of an Eastern-Western division within Tupí.