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Anonymous commented at 2016-08-08 08:07:31 » #2000073
And even if it was common for English speaking families to address siblings using big sister, little brother, etc., you lose some context. There's a big difference between addressing an older sister as nee-chan(very informal) and addressing an older sister as onee-sama(very formal, almost unheard of outside of aristocratic families), and it's a distinction that isn't easy to get across without sounding awkward in English(could you imagine someone addressing a sibling as "Honorable Elder Sister" or something similar in an attempt to translate the deeper meaning of onee-sama?).
Actually, consulting a Japanese-English dictionary, the Japanese don't appear to have an age-neutral term for brother or sister(no results for brother, and the only result for sister is how sister would be rendered using Japanese's more limited phonetics) or a gender-neutral term for siblings in either the singular or plural.
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And even if it was common for English speaking families to address siblings using big sister, little brother, etc., you lose some context. There's a big difference between addressing an older sister as nee-chan(very informal) and addressing an older sister as onee-sama(very formal, almost unheard of outside of aristocratic families), and it's a distinction that isn't easy to get across without sounding awkward in English(could you imagine someone addressing a sibling as "Honorable Elder Sister" or something similar in an attempt to translate the deeper meaning of onee-sama?).
Actually, consulting a Japanese-English dictionary, the Japanese don't appear to have an age-neutral term for brother or sister(no results for brother, and the only result for sister is how sister would be rendered using Japanese's more limited phonetics) or a gender-neutral term for siblings in either the singular or plural.
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