1 Unusual Categories Can Be Stable: The Case of Proto-Sogeram Kin Terms DON DANIELS University of Oregon Abstract. I reconstruct the kinship terminology of Proto-Sogeram, the ances- tor to ten languages of Papua New Guinea, and describe how it has changed in the history of the family. Two patterns are of theoretical interest. One is a recurrent pattern of equating elder siblings with parents, manifested in equations between grandparents and aunts and uncles, and between siblings- in-law and parents. The second is an equation between consanguineal and affinal siblings that I term in-law mirroring. In both cases polysemy and refer- ential overlap among kin terms are diachronically stable, even when they are typologically unusual. The Sogeram data also demonstrates the importance of a focus on individual lexemes in reconstructing kinship terminologies. 1. Introduction. Kinship studies are experiencing something of a resurgence (Jones and Milicic 2011; Kemp and Regier 2012; McConvell, Keen, and Hendery 2013; Sahlins 2013; Merrill and Burgess 2014; Shapiro 2018; Bamford 2019). This is a welcome development, since this semantic domain offers a unique per- spective on our shared humanity (Jones 2018), and its prior neglect was held by some to be “not far short of a scandal” (Levinson 2010:391). In kinship studies, there has been historically a strong emphasis on the “core” meaning of a given kin term, and most of the theoretical treatments have attempted to relate those core meanings to one another via some sort of grid or a set of algebraic expressions (Scheffler and Lounsbury 1971; Gould 2000; Read 2007; Kemp and Regier 2012). While this approach has produced a great deal of progress, a deeper understanding will only be possible when our stories make reference, not just to core meanings, but to peripheral ones as well. It has long been acknowledged that a given kin term can have a wide range of referents. But the mutability of that range, the way it can be manipulated by speakers, has not been seen as integral to the task of diachronic kinship studies because extended meanings have been thought to be fleeting. I argue that polysemy and semantic overlap do not have to be temporary. Kin terms can have unusual polysemies, and multiple terms can refer to the same kin type–and both of these situations can persist for long periods of time. I advance this argument by reconstructing the kinship terminology of Proto- Sogeram, the ancestor to ten languages of Papua New Guinea. I focus on two aspects of the terminology that provide the most crucial insights. The first is a skewing equation that equates elder siblings with parents in extensions of grandparent and parent terms. The second is a pattern I call in-law mirroring,