another vocab question...can anyone give me the literal English translation of the Italian word "ciao"? i've become curious about this because of its use as BOTH a greeting & parting. thanks.

Going the opposite way from what Holden looks for, not only does Mandarin have no word for sibling, there is no word for brother, sister, daughter or son. Age is always specified. So there's a single word for "older son," "younger son," "older sister," "younger sister," etc. There are also separate words for relationships depending on relation through father or mother.

So if you want to say "cousin," to use the specific word for the relationship, there are 32 words for that: your mother or father's older or younger brother or sister's older or younger son or daughter. I asked my Mandarin teacher for the words for my various cousins, and he told me just to spell out the relationship in that manner.

I had a linguistics professor who was Chinese and was complaining about having to sidle up to her older relatives (like, say, a great aunt) and ask them what her daughter was supposed to call them, this causing the relatives to get grumpier and grumpier. She had a great plan to write a computer program that told you the correct name for a given relationship.

Kinship terms in Thai follow a fairly complex pattern reminiscent of (but not genetically related to) those for Chinese languages.

One specifies siblings by their age relative to you, and usually (but optionally) by gender, using combinations of the morphemes phîi [elder sibling], nóng [younger sibling], chay [male], and sao [girl -- not older woman or female in general, curiously]. Nong chay=younger brother, nong sao=younger sister, etc.

There is no single word for sibling, but people sometimes use the phrase 'phîi nóng' as a generic term. Because kinship terms are also frequently used to describe people you who occupy the same age groups as the relatives in question, 'phii nong' is also a friendly or intimate phrase that can be used to say, more or less, "everybody," or "you all," among many other meanings.

There's no word at all for 'cousins' -- the phrase 'luuk phii luuk nong,' or 'elder sibling's child younger sibling's child,' is sometimes used as a generic, and any subset thereof together with modifiers can be used to specify the.

Aunts and uncles vary by which parent they're related to, and can be modified to indicate gender.
Naa: Mom's younger brother or sister. Add 'phuu ying,' "female" or "woman," to indicate aunt, or "phuu chay," "male" for uncle)
Aa: Dad's younger brother or sister
Lung: Elder brother of either parent, or a polite term for any male of that approximate age
Paa: Elder sister of either parent, and a polite term for a woman of that approximate age.
Grandparents are different depending on which parent.

Sorry, that was probably waaaaay too much info, especially since it's almost the opposite of an answer to your question. But good luck! You might also post this in Tower of Babel, although things have been rather quiet there lately.