etymology - Why are there no male or female terms for cousins in English?



In general English doesn't seem to cater well for identifying relationships between people, and the classic example seems to be the term 'cousin' because you can't really work out whether it is someone from your father or mother's side, and you can't even work out if they are male or female. Is there a reason why these words don't exist in English whereas in a language like Chinese this is well established? I thought it might be because back then there are larger families in China and it is difficult otherwise to identify people specifically, but then in English we do have words like uncle and aunty (without specifying the side of the family they are from), and we do have words like brother-in-law or mother-in-law to identify other types of relationships.




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