Ergong language, also known as Stau or Hor language, is one of the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the western part of Sichuan and the upper reaches of the Dadu River. This paper focuses on the Rangtang County dialectal region of Ergong language in the northern “Jiarong group” to introduce the basic situation of the kinship terms in Rangtang County’s Ergong language. It is pointed out that the kinship term system in this dialectal region can be divided into five levels, including ancestor, father, self, child, and grandchild. The analysis from the aspect of word formation shows that there are distinctions in terms of age, gender, and other aspects in the semantic elements, semantic positions, and semantic combinations of this language. Finally, the deep-seated conceptual consciousness of this ethnic group, which includes a focus on the status of the core family, harmonious kinship relationships, gender differences, and the combination of “close to close,” is extracted from the language. These deep-seated consciousnesses embedded in kinship relations constitute people’s entire cognitive world.

It is very natural to assume that almost all languages of the world have the kinship terms for the siblings of the same blood. Generally sex and age are the main factors to determine the terms for the siblings. It is possible to classify eight types of the sibling terms on the basis of sex and age of the alter. Among the eight types, however, only three are very common and the other five types are logically possible but rare in reality. In this paper, the author tries to postulate two universal principles to determine the types of sibling terms : (a) Sex has priority over age. (b) Less terms are used for the younger alters than the elders. Though the Korean kinship system of the siblings acts up to the principles, it shows some peculiarities compared to the systems of other languages. While most languages use the factors of sex and age of the alters to divide the relations of siblings, Korean adds the sex of the ego to these factors. If the ego and the alter are of the same sex, two terms on the basis of age are necessary to refer to the younger and the elder alters in the Middle Korean. On the contrary, if the ego and the alter are of the different sex, the heterosexuality functions as a distinctive factor and only one term is used to the alters, for whom the factor of age doesn't work. The factors affecting the system of sibling terms have changed from the Middle Korean and the homosexuality of ego and alter doesn't work any longer in the contemporary Korean. In addition to this change, the semantic shifts of dongsaeng(sibling), nui(sister) and orabi(brother) also contribute to build the new sibling system of Korean.