What does 'nephew' mean?

Did you know that in English 'nephew' used to mean 'grandson'? Language can be so confusing! (I found this out when I was reading a book by DA Carson called Exegetical Fallacies, and he warned against looking up older or newer meanings of words, when reading the Bible in its original languages.) It gets even more confusing when different people use words differently at the same time! Aboriginal familial relationships are determined by a different system to ours, but when speaking English they have adopted common English terms and used them for their own system. So in an Aboriginal system, I would call my trainer 'son', even though he is old enough to be my grandfather.

We were trying to find out how people might refer to 'forefathers' in English, so Dave drew Jesus' genealogy and we asked how Jesus would refer to each person. "Joseph is his father. Jacob is his grandfather. Matthan is maybe his brother." It didn't really work! We stuck with "grandfathers that lived a long time ago," as that seemed to be understood, even if it's not a natural way to talk.

Read more about the Bininj Kunwok system here: https://bininjkunwok.org.au/information/kinship/