Progress Report: The Ship

[jeriendhal]

The Great Driving Exposition continues. Paul starts wondering about his ex-captain's sanity.

Group Mind Query: On a related note, would anyone with a passable ability in speaking Chinese be willing to help me puzzle out a a choice in parental titles? I know Mandarin has seperate designation for Grandmother/Grandfather depending if they're from the paternal or maternal side. I was just wondering if there would any way to come up with a grammatically plausible way of referring to one's mother, if in fact you had two females contributing to your genetic makeup rather than a mother and a father. It's just a toss away detail for Paul's background that I wanted to throw in, as he's thinking about how awful both of his mothers' cooking is.

Goal: 100,000+ words
Words Today: 383
Words Total: 2,696
Words to Go: 97,304

Comments

[tamhavik.livejournal.com]

I asked a Chinese friend of mine if he could help and he came up with a few possibilities ^^

"In this situation both persons are mothers (媽), where the genetic
function in the relation is the same. A shared womb? Oh well, it's
science fiction after all. Here it will be difficult to give a
distinct designation to each of these persons, unless they have other
differences in relation to the child or each other, e.g. social,
cultural, maybe hierarchic differences (in that case, it may, for
example, be apt to make the distinction of 大媽 "big mom", 小媽 "little
mom").

If only one of the persons is child-bearing, then there is a clear
distinction in genetic function, assuming mammalian context, then the
term 奶媽 (literally "milk-mother", normally meaning "wetnurse", but
perhaps we can overload it here to carry another meaning) can be used.
Thus we have 奶媽 and just 媽.

If more such distinctions can be made, I may be able come up with more terms.

Greetings,

Ming"

I saw that in the last term he probably used a character that's not on my computer... I'll ask him to write it again, this time in western letters. I hope this helps!

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I might go for "Big Mom" and "Little Mom" rather than "Milk-Mother" as I think Paul gestation was in a uterine replicator as opposed to one of his mothers carrying him to term (niether of them wanting to go through the pain and inconvenience of a body birth).

Royce resolves also not to use the terms in the context of an implied BDSM relationship either.

[tamhavik.livejournal.com]

Ah, what is a BDSM relationship?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Ummmm... If you have to ask there's a chance you don't want to know. *blushes* I'll explain it later, privately, if you wish.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Oh, and thank you for going to all that trouble!

[tamhavik.livejournal.com]

No problem ^^ I "use" him as my local expert on Chinese as well.