Nakanaka
nakanaka
- (n.) younger sibling of the opposite sex (the younger sister of a boy, or the younger brother of a girl)
Nakanaka oi’i i Nátali.
“My little sister is Natalie.”
Notes: This post was inspired by a conversation at the Southern California Conlang Meetup this past Tuesday. We were talking about kinship systems, and it occurred to me that the very words I found so odd in Kēlen (i.e. matiē and makāe) are actually in Kamakawi; I’d just forgotten about it.
With these, though, there is a slight twist. So while there are words meaning “sibling of the same gender” and “sibling of the opposite gender”, there are also different words for “older sibling” and “younger sibling”. So a nakanaka is a younger sibling of the opposite gender. (I’ll have a nice little table to show when I’ve posted all four words.)
I came up with this word when thinking of my little sister. I never call her my little carrot, but, in truth, she is my little carrot. 