This can be a problematic word in Irish and probably other languages too. There are three words that can be translated as “family”:
clann in everyday use this means your children or offspring, but it also has more figurative family-ish meanings, Clanna Gael “the Gaels”, Clann Dónaill “the McDonnells”, Clann Liútair “followers of Luther”.
teaghlach literally “household”, i.e. people living together. This is most commonly used for “family”, but not “family tree” which should be crann ginealach “pedigree/genealogy tree”.
muintir “people”. This can range from “people of the same surname”, to “relations”, to muintir na hÉireann “people of Ireland”.
I feel like sometimes Family in Gramps refers to teaghlach, but other times to muintir, but there’s no way to distinguish.
[This post doesn’t really require a response; just flagging that this isn’t always a simple choice in translation]
The original meaning (Latin ‘familia’) is household, thus including not only relatives (by blood or marriage) but also servants, farm hands, maids, and so on.
In modern Swedish, ‘familj’ generally signifies a nuclear family. Still a bit ambiguous, since ‘my family’ can mean both me, my spouse and children as well as me, my parents and siblings.
We also have (and frequently use) the noun ‘släkt’, covering all relatives (by blood and marriage), with constructions such as ‘släktträd’ (family tree) and ‘släktforskning’ (family research, geneaology). ‘Släkt’ corresponds fairly well with kinfolk - but that’s another slightly ambigious word.
Your post illustrates the difficulty of translation. You switch not only to another language but also to another “culture”. A word in language A could have several translations due to nuances in meaning in culture B. And reciprocally, several words in culture A would merge in a single word in language B.
An example of the latter is Town/City in UK (a town becomes a city if it has a cathedral and the king grants a privilege) which is usually translated by Stadt, ville, ciudad or città, irrespective of the presence of a cathedral, and a difference in law.
Can this be solved by adding “context” in gettext translatable strings? I admit that “contexting” all (or at least a non-trivial number of them) strings is a huge task, requiring deep introspection on the meaning of messages.
Another example of this culture conflict is the recent foray into ‘genderless’ attributes to simplify searches.
I preferred the option of using terms that could be a single search instead of multiple: Godchild or Godparent intead of Godson/Goddaughter or Godfather/Godmother. (Since you could simultaneously search the gender if you needed a more narrow form. ) Similarly, Parent, Child, Sibling, Nibling, Pibling (and the various Grands. )
But the feedback from the French was nearing outrage about the thought of genderless nouns. (Although it was 45 years ago, I still vividly recall our French language instructor’s constant “Féminin !” and “Masculin !” haranguing as we did conversational testing. It seemed like such a needless complication.And so appropriate that she was “Miss Grimm” … ou plutôt Mademoiselle !)
It opens difficult questions of scope for Gramps. Should it support every geographical division through history?
Since the user can add these it doesn’t seem so vital, but on the other hand, without a standard that data is harder to share.
I’ve added divisions that have no legal standing any more, like Barony and Townland, since they’re often referred to in records. Also knowing which of Ireland’s 61,119 townlands people are likely to come from is very useful in assessing information.
It’s very unclear if they’re related at all or just co-incidental, but Irish has a similar word, sliocht, which can mean “offspring, descendants” as well as “track, trace”.
It features in the faux blessing/tongue twister go mbeadh seacht shliocht ag sliocht do shleachta “that your children’s children would have seven children” /gə mʲex ʃaxt lʲʊxt æg ʃlʲʊxt də lʲaxtə/.
Indeed. And there is also the “access cost” to Gramps for newcomers and then the learning curve slope.
IMHO, Gramps should provide minimal, usually agreed, factory-properties so that it can immediately be used. Birth, death, marriage are among these. Geography is more controversial because the hierarchy depends both on the period and location. Country is probably an accepted notion (though the idea about it varied). We need one or two intermediate levels before reaching “grouped inhabited place”. I write it so because choice between village and town is a matter of conventional definition. And a place usually evolves from one “qualification” to the other one. So, even the “qualification” should be a time-stamped attribute.
There are two issues here.
The first one is related to custom categories. IMHO, custom categories are presently badly implemented. They all end up as CUSTOM type with an attached user-defined “value” (the name of the category). When you want to query your tree, all custom categories are equivalent: they are all equal to CUSTOM and the “value” is not visible by the filters. I have an idea on how to improve this but I must fix other matters before tackling it.
The second one is sharing the custom categories. When importing a customised tree, the new categories may conflict with local ones.This means the import plugin must be adapted to handle such a possibility. Once again, I have a feature in mind to complement the above “idea”. Roughly, this means a small modification to the XML (to add a CUSTOM dictionary) and preprocessing to reassign encoding to prevent conflicts. Then import would proceed, changing CUSTOM encoding on the fly. There are other subtleties so that man is kept in the loop.