The father's brother being walen, the father's brother's son is manwalen and his daughter yanwalen; the mother's brother being ninar, the mother's brother's son is manninar and his daughter yanninar.
According to the main thesis of these lectures, these descriptive usages should own some definite social cause. The descriptive terminology seems to be particularly definite in the case of cousins, and it might be suggested that they are dependent, at any rate in part and in so far as Egypt is concerned, on the prevalence of marriage with a cousin. Marriages with the daughter of a father's brother or of a mother's brother are especially orthodox and popular in Egypt, and different degrees of preference for marriage with different classes of cousin would produce just such a social need as would have led to the definite distinction of the different kinds of cousin from one another by means of descriptive terms.
It is more probable, however, that the use of descriptive terms in the languages of the Semites and of the Shilluks and Dinkas has been the outcome of a definite form of social organisation, viz., that in which the social unit is neither the family in the narrow sense, nor the clan, but that body of persons of common descent living in one house or in some other kind of close association which we call the patriarchal or extended family, the Gross-familie of the Germans. It is a feature of the Semitic and Nilotic systems, not only to distinguish
