1986: Germanic Terms of Affinity: Why Father-In-Laws are so Difficult May 23, 2020

In 2 weeks, there will be a surprise announced to commemorate the 2,000th post. Mark your calendars

In German, as in English there is a combining form to indicate relation through marriage, as in '-in-law', or in German 'schwieger-', though on its own it will imply 'mother-in-law'. So for any given relation, one can simply add this form as with 'son-in-law' or 'Schwiegersohn', but in this case exclusively 'son-in-law' can be replaced with the less common but still acceptable 'Eidam' in German. This is the same in Yiddish, but the Yiddish for 'daughter-in-law', or שנור (shnur) is a cognate with the German dialectal form 'Schnur' meaning 'sister-in-law' instead, though more often it just means 'cord'. Indeed, Yiddish does not use the formulas like Standard German or English, and has separate words for each relative, including שוויגער (shviger) for 'mother-in-law', and שווער (shver) for 'father-in-law', which is also the same word as the adjective meaning 'difficult'.

Support Word Facts on Patreon.com/wordfacts