How do I address someone else's great-grandchild/great-grandchildren? ひいおまごさん
or ひおまごさん?
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-12-24T13:25:58.960
92708
2022-01-27T00:07:45.703
2021-12-24T14:19:13.600
48151
48151
question
kinship-terms
Japanese kinship terms
First off, the honorific prefix お or ご must come at the very front of a word.
Neither ひい[お]{●}まごさん or ひ[お]{●}まごさん work because the ひ ( _" great-"_) and the
noun it modifies cannot have anything between them. As a (very rough) analogy,
it might be like saying _" great mister grandchild"_ instead of _" mister
great-grandchild"_ -- weird enough that listeners / readers might not be able
to understand the intended meaning.

_(Note: This works differently for "grandparent" terms, because the お prefix
has l̲e̲x̲i̲c̲a̲l̲i̲z̲e̲d̲ for those terms -- it has become part of the
regular word. However, for まご, the お is still a prefix.)_

Separately, I'm more accustomed to the short-"i" version ひまご, but then again
my experience with Japanese has been in the Tōhoku and Kantō regions, and the
long-"i" version ひいまご might be more common in other parts of Japan. That said,
I do see that a couple of my dictionary resources list ひいまご as an alternative
form and point the reader to look at ひまご as the main entry, so take that for
what you will. :) One such example is [here at
Kotobank](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%9B%BE%E5%AD%AB-2056633#E7.B2.BE.E9.81.B8.E7.89.88.20.E6.97.A5.E6.9C.AC.E5.9B.BD.E8.AA.9E.E5.A4.A7.E8.BE.9E.E5.85.B8).

Lastly, Google can sometimes be helpful in getting a quick-and-dirty idea of
how common different wording might be. Looking up
["おひまごさん"](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%E3%81%8A%E3%81%B2%E3%81%BE%E3%81%94%E3%81%95%E3%82%93%22)
shows me only one hit anywhere at all, while looking up
["ひまごさん"](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%E3%81%B2%E3%81%BE%E3%81%94%E3%81%95%E3%82%93%22)
shows me a little more than 1,000 hits. My guess is that the unprefixed
version is used more commonly.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-12-24T19:03:52.000
92710
2021-12-24T19:12:13.777
2021-12-24T19:12:13.777
5229
5229
92708
answer