Althouse: "If a father and his son take a widow and her daughter in marriage, so that the son marries the mother and the father the daughter..."

August 30, 2013

"If a father and his son take a widow and her daughter in marriage, so that the son marries the mother and the father the daughter..."

"... say, please, what is the relationship between the sons they will bear?"

ADDED: Based on the comments, nobody got what I found amusing here, undoubtedly because they didn't click through.

14 comments:

Magson said...: Aren't those the beginning lines of the song "I'm my own Grandpa?"; 8/30/13, 4:00 PM
Fr. Denis Lemieux said...: Complicated.; 8/30/13, 4:11 PM
Leon said...: i believe the name of the song you are thinking of is "i'm my own grandpa"; 8/30/13, 4:25 PM
AHL said...: Father (F) m. Daughter (D) and Son (S) m. Widow (W).
S+W= Son A (SA)
F+D= Son B (SB)
SA will be F's half-grandson and half-brother.
SB will be S's half-brother and half-grandson.

This is so "Wuthering Heights"....; 8/30/13, 4:57 PM
Sam L. said...: The relationship is gonna be weird!; 8/30/13, 6:13 PM
The Godfather said...: If the "relationship between the sons" means what is the relationship of the son(s) of one of the marriages to the son(s) of the other marriage, they are in each case uncles and nephews (taking account in each case of both parents).; 8/30/13, 9:55 PM
SukieTawdry said...: Jebus, who cares. Stay away from these people.; 8/30/13, 10:31 PM
Gospace said...: In my family a set 2 brothers married 2 sisters. Took a while for family tree maker to take it.

And I've wondered if in a state that allows first cousin marriage, if a set of identical twin boys marries a set of identical twin girls, will the kids who are legally first cousins but genetically siblings be allowed to marry?; 8/30/13, 10:42 PM
Abdul Abulbul Amir said...: The song "I'm my own grandpa" is all about this situation.; 8/30/13, 11:23 PM
Smilin' Jack said...: It's a straightforward exercise in genetics to calculate the coefficient of consanguinity, but I'm too stoned to do it right now. Right now I just think the term "coefficient of consanguinity" sounds really cool.; 8/30/13, 11:27 PM
Ann Althouse said...: The point of this post was to click through and discover what was funny, but these comments help me see that people don't do that.

The question was asked in the year 800.; 8/31/13, 7:34 AM
Michelle Dulak Thomson said...: I clicked through immediately, and the thing that amused me was that it was written ca. 800 as part of a set of questions for "sharpening the young" -- i.e., as something like a high school textbook.

If you put a question like that to American high school students now, you'd hear exploding skulls from sea to shining sea.; 8/31/13, 10:27 AM
Molly said...: Umm... Men don't bear children.; 8/31/13, 12:18 PM
Krumhorn said...: Half the folks in Western Kentucky I grew up with had families like this.

We called each other cousin. Or Cuz.

- Kentucky Krumhorn; 8/31/13, 12:36 PM