Note 22 — Chapter I · THE SOCIAL ORGANISATION

Ab-čuga and ab-čupal. These are the masculine and feminine forms of one word. Mr Portman22 gives them as meaning “married man” and “married woman.” I heard them used, however, with the personal pronoun. Thus a man applied the term ab-čuga to his older brother, his older sister’s husband, and to his father’s brother. In this usage these two terms seem to be in a sense reciprocal to aka-kuam. A younger married man will refer to older married men and women as his ab-čuga and ab-čupal, while they will call him aka-kuam.