The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

Chapter 5. Describing Relationships and Structures

Robert J. Glushko

Matthew Mayernik

Alberto Pepe

Murray Maloney

5.1. Introduction

We can consider a family to be a collection of people affiliated by some connections with each other such as common ancestors or a common residence. The Simpson family includes a man named Homer and a woman named Marge, the married parents of three sibling children, a boy named Bart and two girls, Lisa and Maggie. This is a magical family that speaks many languages, but always uses the language of the local television station. In the English-speaking Simpson family, the boy describes his parents as his father and mother and his two siblings as his sisters. In the Spanish speaking Simpson family the boy refers to his parents as su padre y su madre and his sisters are las hermanas. In the Chinese Simpson family Lisa and Maggie refer to each other according to their relative ages; Lisa, the elder sister as jiě jie and, Maggie, the younger sister as mèi mei.253[Bus]

[253][Bus] The Simpsons TV show began in 1989 and is now the longest running scripted TV show ever. The official website is www.thesimpsons.com. The show is dubbed into French, Italian and Spanish for viewers in Quebec, France, Italy, Latin America and Spain. The Simpson’s Movie has been dubbed into Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese. For more information about Mandarin kinship terms see http://mandarin.about.com/od/vocabularylists/tp/family.htm ...