Someone else posted the chart for these terms, https://ac-journal.org/journal/vol3/Iss3/spec1/huang_jia.htm..., but I'm guessing the reasoning is probably very similar to patrilineal naming in many Western cultures, where children take the last name of their father. Using that criteria, another name for this relation would be "Female cousin who is younger than you, with a different last name". That is, only your father's brothers' kids will have the same last name as you. Your mother's siblings (brothers or sisters) and your father's sisters' kids have different last names.
It would make more sense to call it CNLabelContactRelationBiaomei. It's a concept that doesn't exist in English, so why use English? Nobody gets any wiser by that word salad. The docs can provide an explanation.
Maybe this was specifically done for Chinese but other cultures have the same or similar definitions.
In Indian culture, your mother’s sister’s children are like your siblings and not cousins.
Whereas your mother’s brother’s children are considered cousins (ie,one step removed).
I know that South Korea also has similar distinctions.
Uncle/Aunt/Cousin is fairly imprecise in many cultures.
They may have a code style book to avoid foreign language terms.
Also, suppose you’re localizing something to German. You have to learn English to understand the labels, but why would you also have to learn Chinese, etc (how many different languages/cultures gave rise to items in that long “see also” list?)
Finally, if this happens to also be a special case in some other language (I wouldn’t know), why prefer the Chinese (transliterated) name?
I'd guess that, in whatever language this is relevant for, there's a "feminine" marker that is ambiguous wrt whether it modifies parent/father into mother or sibling into sister.
The reason that your father's brother's daughter is not 表, while children of any of your mother's siblings are, is very simple: your father's brother's daughter belongs to the same family you do. Your mother's siblings' children, like your father's sisters' children, belong to other families.
Thank you for the explanation. I said it was a guess, and it wasn't too far off; either way it's literal patriarchy embedded into the language. I wonder if people's authoritative tone (and downvotes) would change if they discovered that there was also another language where the distinction was meaningful but based on different reasoning.
I strongly suspect the terms arose in the past from legal terminology around inheritance. It was very common in most countries for the eldest son to inherit their from their parents, and in families where there were no sons it was often the nearest male relative like a cousin. A cousin on the father's side had precedence over a cousin on the mother's side, but in English there aren't specific terms for those.
Perhaps in Chinese cultures in the past it was even more complicated, and necessitated terms for specific older and younger sibling's children depending on whether they were the offspring of a brother or a sister.
I'd imagine it's been added to facilitate some very culture-specific familial relationship term. Those tend to be rooted in ancient history and are often inconsistently (and arguably pointlessly) gendered but still need to be maintained to keep that culture happy.
