gens
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: simple
Topics: anthropology
biology
human-sciences
natural-sciences
sciences
zoology
Etymology: Borrowed from Latin gēns (“gens; people, tribe”), from Proto-Italic *gentis, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵénh₁tis (“birth; production”), from *ǵenh₁- (“to beget; to give birth; to produce”) + *-tis (suffix forming abstract or action nouns from verb roots). Doublet of kind, genesis, and jati. See also gender, generate, gentile, genus; also Latin gigno (“to bring forth”).
Inflected forms:
form: gentes
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: genses
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: A legally defined unit of Roman society, being a collection of people related through a common ancestor by birth, marriage or adoption, possibly over many generations, and sharing the same nomen gentilicium.
pos: noun
tags: Ancient-Rome
historical
examples: [page 568, column 2] There were certain sacred rites (sacra gentilitia) which belonged to a gens, to the observance of which all the members of a gens, as such, were bound, whether they were members by birth, adoption, or adrogation. A person was freed from the observance of such sacra, and lost the privileges connected with his gentile rites, when he lost his gens, that is, when he was adrogated, adopted, or even emancipated; for adrogation, adoption, and emancipation were accompanied by a diminutio capitis. […] [page 569, column 2] As the gentes were subdivisions of the three ancient tribes, the populus (in the ancient sense) alone had gentes, so that to be a patrician and to have a gens were synonymous; and thus we find the expressions gens and patricii constantly united.
Caius Julius Caesar belonged to the gens Julius, his father's name was Caesar, and his own individual name (praenomen) was Caius. Women were given the clan name as their own; Caesar's sister was called Julia, and a younger sister would have been called Julia Minor.
gloss: A tribal subgroup whose members are characterized by having the same descent, usually along the male line; clan.
pos: noun
examples: The Kamilaroi are divided into six gentes, standing with reference to the right of marriage, in two divisions, […] Originally the first three gentes were not allowed to intermarry with each other, because they were subdivisions of an original gens; but they were permitted to marry into either of the other gentes, and vice versâ.
The taboos, the laws, the rules of gentes, tribes, and nations, from the lowest to the highest, are upheld by a vague terror and sacred awe which society impresses on man by threats of ill-luck, fearful evil, and terrible punishments befalling sinners and transgressors of the tabooed, of the holy and the forbidden, charged with a mysterious, highly contagious, and virulently infective life-consuming energy.
While a woman and a man [who are native Hawaiians] primarily establish a family, they nonetheless remain members of different genses, and it is only as members of different genses that they are able to set up the family. At the same time, the children belong to the family of their parents, but owing to the validity of their mother's side—exclusively, to the gens of their mother. Thus, the members of one and the same family, the closest blood-related community, are members of two different genses.
gloss: A host-specific lineage of a brood parasite species.
pos: noun
Derived words: genticide
gentile
subgens
Translations: