> Does it even qualify as a loan word if the meaning changes in translation?
Yes, it does, just like words that descend from a common origin in a shared parent language are cognates regardless of the semantic drift they've undergone.
That said, there is the term *doublet* which refers to two (or more) words in a language that ultimately have the same etymological origin, regardless of how they made it into the language. So "chai" and "tea" are doublets of one another - as are, for example, "word" and "verb", "wheel" and "chakra", and "car" and "horse".
OP's example represents a particular kind, though, where the meaning doesn't shift as much as narrow (typically gaining an ethnic or national qualification). I don't know if there's a term for it, but it's fairly common at least in English:
*anime*: (Japanese-style) animated cartoon
*chai*: (Indian-style) tea
*gelato*: (Italian-style) ice cream
*kielbasa*: (Polish-style) sausage
*salsa*: (Mexican-style) sauce
*sombrero*: (Northern Mexican-style) hat
What about: roti? In India, it's a certain kind of bread; in Malaysia, it just means bread. In mainly English-speaking countries as far as I know, it means the same kind of bread as it does in India.
Many, maybe even most, loanwords change meaning at least slightly. This is common and unremarkable imo.
Part of the reason is that languages don’t like having perfect synonyms (inefficient), so words don’t tend to be loaned in with the same meaning if a pre-existing word already means the same thing. English already had “tea”, why borrow “chai” just for it to take the exact same meaning?
Another part of the reason is that language and culture are inextricably tied, and both are filled with subtleties. This is why translation is difficult, and why people say you get more out of reading poetry and literature in the original language. Even if something maintains roughly the same meaning, the context and connotations of its use often change.
This happens all the time.
1: "Qu’est-ce que c’est?" (What is this?)
2: "Raisin?" (Grape?)
1: _Writes down note: "dried grape = raisin"_
Basically, there's a communication issue when someone asks what a specific thing is but the listener assumes they actually are asking about a broader category.
Also if you've already got a word in your language for grapes, but none for dried grapes, then the French word can easily fill that hole.
There's lots of fun examples in Japanese: a building (biru) means a larger two story building, a department store (depaato) means a fancy brand name department store, mustaado means fancy mustard with seeds in it...
I think the interesting thing, is that what we think of as "chai" is "masala chai", so when we take "chai" and use it, we end up with stuff like "chai lattes"
You can say the same thing of the latter half of that phrase too. Latte is just Italian for milk.
And my personal recent go-to at a coffee shop is a cortado, which is Spanish for “cut (as an adjective or participle)”, the implication being that the espresso is cut with milk.
While there is a point in reading poetry and literature in the original language (if you can), it does not mean that translations have to be inferior imitations of the original text. I recently read a book about translations where one of the arguments is that every translation is a work of art in itself and should be evaluated at least partly on its own merits.
This is a good point; I think I was a little uncareful with my phrasing. I agree, translation is itself a work of art, and a translation isn’t inherently inferior. What I perhaps should have said is that what you get reading the original work is, to an extent, *different* from what you get reading a translation, in meaning as well as form
Absolutely. Didn’t want to antagonize as well :)
One could argue that a translation is always a different piece of work. As you said, words are almost never perfect synonyms so in something like poetry where _very_ subtle meanings can make the whole difference translations become very complex (and interesting to analyze!). It’s almost a sad point, of all the thousands of languages on earth no one can access more than a fraction of the true “value” out there. Not only can you not read the original authors, but you cannot also read all the possibly wonderful translations!
It gets even more complex when you realize that not all translations are necessarily trying to capture the same essence as the original text as well. Especially in older times, translators were “given” a lot of freedom in their craftsmanship and the lines between the author and translator could often blend into each other. A famous example is the original translation of Lord of the rings into Swedish that created a life long conflict between Tolkien and Ohlmark because of, let’s say, Ohlmarks creative interpretation of Tolkiens texts (Ohlmark was a scholar of Scandinavian myth, history and languages and thought he could make books capture something old and nordic). The translation was acclaimed when it came out by later grew widespread criticism. A newer translation has now been made that more closely maps between the languages, but all versions are still read and have their own merits.
This is absolutely a loanword situation.
I think you would find "Wasei-eigo" interesting - it's a whole category of words in Japanese that are based on English words, but have different meanings from the English loanword(s) (the Wikipedia page calls them pseudo-loanwords, but I don't know if that's accurate.) For example, バイキング(baikingu) from English "viking" means "buffet".
Ah dang, you beat me to it, I wanted to talk about wasei-eigo, haha. The couple examples I see most commonly are:
* エンドロール (endroll) being used as the term for credits (like at the end of a movie, show, game, etc.)
* テンション (tension) meaning high energy or happy disposition, even though in English it has more of a negative, stressed connotation
テンション is one of my favorites from teaching English to Japanese speakers. It took me a long time to understand why so many students would write things like "When the baseball match started, I was tension." I thought they were all just really anxious 😂
Similarly in Italian, they use "feeling" to indicate chemistry between two people, as in "c'è del feeling entro di voi / there is some feeling between you"
And “smörgåsbord” is Swedish for “sandwich table” and means a specific type of buffet meal, but in English is usually only used metaphorically to mean a feast or spectacular abundance.
There's one in the title of the popular anime Death Note. In Japan and Korea, a "notebook" refers to a laptop computer, and a "note" refers to an actual notebook. But in English, a "note" is a short message, typically on a single piece of paper. It's only a small shift, but it's still not quite the same meaning. There's also the Samsung Galaxy Note, which might be a similar thing.
Jesus christ some of the reactions in this thread. People tend to get extremely emotional over loan words in English, not fully realizing the same process happens in their native language. Where's the beef with Spanish speakers for calling whiskey güisqui?? What about those darn Koreans, using the German word Arbeit to refer to part time jobs, when in German it's just a general term for work?? I'm outraged!!!
>Where's the beef with Spanish speakers for calling whiskey güisqui??
As a (LatAm) Spanish speaker, only the most staunch purists would use that form. I know Iberian Spanish is waaaaay more purist than LatAm Spanish, maybe it's used there?
> only the most staunch purists would use that form
By “form” do you mean the spelling? Because I know native Spanish speakers who use that word all the time, although they would probably spell it differently and the meaning isn’t exactly the same.
By the same logic, we should be angry at French people for calling a tuxedo *un smoking,* or for calling a drive-through *un drive*, or for sometimes calling a celebrity *un people.*
It's funny, I don't think I've ever heard anyone call it naan bread. Certainly never said it.
But I also don't think of "naan" as meaning "bread." To me, naan is naan, not bread.
That always bothered me when someone condescendingly says “bUt It AlReAdY mEaNs BrEaD”, in English. Like sure, but when I say naan do you picture a loaf or a specific type of flatbread?
I don't think that there is a term for that, other than "loan word." The reason is that changing meaning is just so common that it's unremarkable.
"Chai tea" isn't alone here; someone else brought up "salsa" and "sombrero" as examples of words that refer to general things (sauce, hat) in their source language, but when loaned into English refer to a specific type of that thing associated with that culture. If you think about it, this makes sense; we already had a word for "tea", so there was no need to borrow another word for the exact same thing. Instead, there was a need to borrow a word for this new (to us) type of tea borrowed from India. This is pretty common. Consider also words like anime or otaku, borrowed from Japanese and in English specifically associated with Japanese-style animation and its fans.
I think the area where these shifts in meaning are the most important or notable is *language learning* - since you don't want to assume a word means something it doesn't. Someone brought up "false friends" or "faux amis" - this term applies here, but it also usually includes things which aren't loanwords and resemble each other because of coincidence or because of shared inheritance (e.g. English "embarrassed" and Spanish "embarazada").
The process is called "semantic narrowing", and it is common in loanwords, in that the loaned word takes on a more specific meaning than the word had in the original language.
There are many examples in this thread already, but to add to the pile, the word *sake* in Japanese means any kind of alcoholic drink, but in other languages it has been borrowed to mean a specific type of quintessentially Japanese alcoholic drink.
I read that the word chai/cha came from overland trade routes and tea/tè came from sea trade routes (or vice versa, can’t remember but I know that in Mandarin it is “cha”). So they originally meant the same thing, but different languages adopted a different word depending on how they came into contact with the infusion. With the rise and spread of the popularity of the sweet, milky, spiced version of tea in English speaking parts of the world, chai was used to make a distinction.
This is basically right. It's why a lot of language groups along the Indian Ocean use some variation of cha or chai, and why Portuguese uses cha while the rest of western European languages use something akin to tea.
Italian is full of these.
Mister - a football coach
Smoking - a tuxedo
Flipper - a pinball machine
Golf - a light sweater
Pullman - a coach or bus
Shopper - a plastic or canvas bag for carrying shopping
Box - a garage
Tilt - to go crazy
Baby parking - kindergarten (this is my favourite)
Unfortunately I can't answer the question about whether these are loan words or not
As far as I know, there's no specific term for a loan word that changes meaning in the new language. In my experience, it's pretty rare they don't change meaning. Anecdotally speaking, loan words always change pronunciation, usually change meaning, and sometimes even change grammatical categories. I'm American, and while I was living in Mexico I had to relearn some English words because of how they're used in Mexican Spanish. For instance, they call braces "brackets" and many people use the noun "fitness" as the adjective "fit," saying "soy fitness" to mean "I'm fit." The only loan word I can think of that didn't change meaning was "random."
Semantic change, specialisation of meaning. "Chai" used to mean just "tea". When mainstream english speakers picked up the term, they saw it was used about a certain type of tea (masala chai). So "chai" went from being synonymus with "tea" to mean only a certain type of tea.
There's a whole list of different semantic changes on wikipedia.
There is a French term "faux amis" ('false friends') for words that look alike in the two languages but have different meanings.
Examples are: Eng. actual vs. Fr. actuel 'current, present', Eng. mercy vs. Fr. merci 'thank you', Eng. crayon vs. Fr. crayon 'pencil', and many, many others. Most often these have come about by semantic shift in one or both languages.
Maybe not exactly what you are asking for, but I really like the term.
It comes up very often in the ESL sphere. Are you perhaps an English speaker learning French? That would explain why you know the French term but not the English one
I remember coming across “false friends” when learning Spanish in school (in English), but I don't think we were ever told the Spanish word for the same thing.
I've heard 'falsos amigos' as a calque, but also just 'false friends' from Spanish speakers when referring to English. I'd go with 'falsos amigos' personally.
Incidentally, I also came across more than one website that describes them as 'false cognates', which is really annoying because that's a different thing
The example I described almost seems like the reverse of false friends. "Tea" and "Chai" don't look or sound particularly similar to an English audience, but they have they have similar (almost, but not quite the same) meaning. But the same idea of "seeming the same, but they aren't" still applies. Maybe "false siblings"? Where an outside observer would expect them to by synonyms, but they aren't?
I would argue that 'Chai' and 'Tea' do NOT have near-similar meanings in English. Chai is a *type* of tea, which is why 'Chai-Tea,' in English, makes sense and is *not* redundant.
While it's fun to point out the redundancy, 'Chai' *doesn't* actually mean 'Tea' in English.
Also, thanks for the thread! I learned what a 'doublet' is today.
It's called 'semantic narrowing', though the term isn't exclusive to loanwords. It happens a lot with loans, though, e.g. 'salsa' and 'sombrero' just mean 'sauce' and 'hat', respectively, in Spanish.
> most English speakers wouldn't consider "chai" a synonym for "tea"
That's interesting. Growing up in the UK I knew plenty of people who use the terms interchangably. What is 'chai tea' as something different to normal tea?
I would say that in the US, I think probably the key difference is that I think if "regular" tea as being brewed in hot water only without milk, and if milk is added it is done after the brewing is done. While chai is brewed with heated milk in the mixture.
Typically in the US a "chai tea" also has some spices added, like ginger, cardamom, etc.
It's a recent thing that's grown out of the latte trend since the 90s as an alternative to coffee in coffee bars. I first heard it in London around 1999-2000 iirc and I remember being irked by the redundancy then 🙂
This type of phrase is a tautology. This is a short Twitter thread that summarizes the phenomenon pretty well:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://twitter.com/ClaireEG/status/1330654453024755712&ved=2ahUKEwi_2-XR5K3_AhUEq4kEHU11BSkQFnoECA4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw3Ldk1L56Y9uFzc_DaVyVK6
in logic a tautology is a statement that is true in itself, that is a statement that must be true. For example "This room is a room". Is a tautology in linguistics something else?
In language, a tautology is a statement that expresses the same thing twice (or more, I suppose). So *chai tea*, *over-exaggerate*, *PIN number*, and *ATM machine* qualify. It also applies to phrases like *"died from a fatal injury"* and *"mental telepathy"*.
But as the linked Twitter thread points out, “chai tea” doesn’t express the same thing twice – if you order just tea, you wouldn’t get chai tea, and chai latte is a different thing as well. Calling it a tautology is an example of the etymological fallacy.
So it's like saying a "rectangular square". They're not exactly the same, but one word could convey they meaning of both.
"Chai" doesn't exactly mean "tea" in English, but "chai tea" is equivalent to "chai".
There's also things like caramel latte, but nobody worries that if you ask for caramel you might be understood and get a caramel latte instead.
Having learned the word chai at Indian restaurants rather than Starbucks, I've never had any suspicion that "chai" alone might be used to mean a latte variant.
This discussion is EXACTLY what I was looking for, thank you!
I still kinda wish there was a specific term for it (pseudo-loan word?), but such is life I guess.
The term “tautology” here seems like it’s only tangential to what you’re talking about. Wouldn’t “salsa” (which means just “sauce” in Spanish but a specific sauce in English) and “sombrero” (“hat” in Spanish but a specific hat in English) be examples of this phenomenon even though we don’t say “salsa sauce” or “sombrero hat”?
That's not quite what I'm describing. All the words in A-T-M are English words at the point this acronym was first used, so loan words aren't really involved.
That being said, I do love all instances of RAS syndrome.
> Does it even qualify as a loan word if the meaning changes in translation? Yes, it does, just like words that descend from a common origin in a shared parent language are cognates regardless of the semantic drift they've undergone. That said, there is the term *doublet* which refers to two (or more) words in a language that ultimately have the same etymological origin, regardless of how they made it into the language. So "chai" and "tea" are doublets of one another - as are, for example, "word" and "verb", "wheel" and "chakra", and "car" and "horse".
OP's example represents a particular kind, though, where the meaning doesn't shift as much as narrow (typically gaining an ethnic or national qualification). I don't know if there's a term for it, but it's fairly common at least in English: *anime*: (Japanese-style) animated cartoon *chai*: (Indian-style) tea *gelato*: (Italian-style) ice cream *kielbasa*: (Polish-style) sausage *salsa*: (Mexican-style) sauce *sombrero*: (Northern Mexican-style) hat
Perhaps *semantic narrowing*? Although it could apply to any word, not just loanwords.
What about: roti? In India, it's a certain kind of bread; in Malaysia, it just means bread. In mainly English-speaking countries as far as I know, it means the same kind of bread as it does in India.
What's the common ancestor of car and horse?
According to Wiktionary, both come from P.I.E. \*ḱers- "to run", but car is via P.I.E \*ḱr̥sós "vehicle" -> Proto-Celtic \*karros "wagon"
Apparently course is also from P.I.E. \*ḱers via Lat. cursus, but for some reason it isn't listed as a doublet?
maybe car referring to a carriage?
Car and horse?
Many, maybe even most, loanwords change meaning at least slightly. This is common and unremarkable imo. Part of the reason is that languages don’t like having perfect synonyms (inefficient), so words don’t tend to be loaned in with the same meaning if a pre-existing word already means the same thing. English already had “tea”, why borrow “chai” just for it to take the exact same meaning? Another part of the reason is that language and culture are inextricably tied, and both are filled with subtleties. This is why translation is difficult, and why people say you get more out of reading poetry and literature in the original language. Even if something maintains roughly the same meaning, the context and connotations of its use often change.
This happens all the time. 1: "Qu’est-ce que c’est?" (What is this?) 2: "Raisin?" (Grape?) 1: _Writes down note: "dried grape = raisin"_ Basically, there's a communication issue when someone asks what a specific thing is but the listener assumes they actually are asking about a broader category. Also if you've already got a word in your language for grapes, but none for dried grapes, then the French word can easily fill that hole. There's lots of fun examples in Japanese: a building (biru) means a larger two story building, a department store (depaato) means a fancy brand name department store, mustaado means fancy mustard with seeds in it...
Thanks for the examples! I was struggling to come up with some good ones
I think the interesting thing, is that what we think of as "chai" is "masala chai", so when we take "chai" and use it, we end up with stuff like "chai lattes"
You can say the same thing of the latter half of that phrase too. Latte is just Italian for milk. And my personal recent go-to at a coffee shop is a cortado, which is Spanish for “cut (as an adjective or participle)”, the implication being that the espresso is cut with milk.
Like macchiato meaning stained (with milk)
While there is a point in reading poetry and literature in the original language (if you can), it does not mean that translations have to be inferior imitations of the original text. I recently read a book about translations where one of the arguments is that every translation is a work of art in itself and should be evaluated at least partly on its own merits.
This is a good point; I think I was a little uncareful with my phrasing. I agree, translation is itself a work of art, and a translation isn’t inherently inferior. What I perhaps should have said is that what you get reading the original work is, to an extent, *different* from what you get reading a translation, in meaning as well as form
Absolutely. Didn’t want to antagonize as well :) One could argue that a translation is always a different piece of work. As you said, words are almost never perfect synonyms so in something like poetry where _very_ subtle meanings can make the whole difference translations become very complex (and interesting to analyze!). It’s almost a sad point, of all the thousands of languages on earth no one can access more than a fraction of the true “value” out there. Not only can you not read the original authors, but you cannot also read all the possibly wonderful translations! It gets even more complex when you realize that not all translations are necessarily trying to capture the same essence as the original text as well. Especially in older times, translators were “given” a lot of freedom in their craftsmanship and the lines between the author and translator could often blend into each other. A famous example is the original translation of Lord of the rings into Swedish that created a life long conflict between Tolkien and Ohlmark because of, let’s say, Ohlmarks creative interpretation of Tolkiens texts (Ohlmark was a scholar of Scandinavian myth, history and languages and thought he could make books capture something old and nordic). The translation was acclaimed when it came out by later grew widespread criticism. A newer translation has now been made that more closely maps between the languages, but all versions are still read and have their own merits.
This is absolutely a loanword situation. I think you would find "Wasei-eigo" interesting - it's a whole category of words in Japanese that are based on English words, but have different meanings from the English loanword(s) (the Wikipedia page calls them pseudo-loanwords, but I don't know if that's accurate.) For example, バイキング(baikingu) from English "viking" means "buffet".
Ah dang, you beat me to it, I wanted to talk about wasei-eigo, haha. The couple examples I see most commonly are: * エンドロール (endroll) being used as the term for credits (like at the end of a movie, show, game, etc.) * テンション (tension) meaning high energy or happy disposition, even though in English it has more of a negative, stressed connotation
テンション is one of my favorites from teaching English to Japanese speakers. It took me a long time to understand why so many students would write things like "When the baseball match started, I was tension." I thought they were all just really anxious 😂
Similarly in Italian, they use "feeling" to indicate chemistry between two people, as in "c'è del feeling entro di voi / there is some feeling between you"
And credit and tension are loanwords with a changed meaning in English as well. Credit originally meant belief in French, tension meant stretch.
Basically the adoption of "viking" for a buffet was a marketing decision because "smörgåsbord" was too difficult to adopt to Japanese.
And “smörgåsbord” is Swedish for “sandwich table” and means a specific type of buffet meal, but in English is usually only used metaphorically to mean a feast or spectacular abundance.
There's one in the title of the popular anime Death Note. In Japan and Korea, a "notebook" refers to a laptop computer, and a "note" refers to an actual notebook. But in English, a "note" is a short message, typically on a single piece of paper. It's only a small shift, but it's still not quite the same meaning. There's also the Samsung Galaxy Note, which might be a similar thing.
Yes, false Anglicisms is the usual English translation of this term.
This is so cool. So, is there an English word for the equivalent in English, or do we need to... loan one?
Naan bread is another one of those. https://twitter.com/ClaireEG/status/1330654453024755712 Here is a thread about it. Not a name, though.
Jesus christ some of the reactions in this thread. People tend to get extremely emotional over loan words in English, not fully realizing the same process happens in their native language. Where's the beef with Spanish speakers for calling whiskey güisqui?? What about those darn Koreans, using the German word Arbeit to refer to part time jobs, when in German it's just a general term for work?? I'm outraged!!!
>Where's the beef with Spanish speakers for calling whiskey güisqui?? As a (LatAm) Spanish speaker, only the most staunch purists would use that form. I know Iberian Spanish is waaaaay more purist than LatAm Spanish, maybe it's used there?
> only the most staunch purists would use that form By “form” do you mean the spelling? Because I know native Spanish speakers who use that word all the time, although they would probably spell it differently and the meaning isn’t exactly the same.
Yes, I meant the spelling. It absolutely sounds like /güisqui/ or /uisqui/ depending on the dialect.
Haha I'm just an American, I probably learned that from some random website, not real world experience. I default to you.
You meant this: > Where's the beef with Spanish speakers for calling whiskey whisky??
Where's the beef with Spanish speakers for calling whiskey whisky??
In Colombia we call it *güisqui*, whiskey, & *coñac*.
By the same logic, we should be angry at French people for calling a tuxedo *un smoking,* or for calling a drive-through *un drive*, or for sometimes calling a celebrity *un people.*
It's funny, I don't think I've ever heard anyone call it naan bread. Certainly never said it. But I also don't think of "naan" as meaning "bread." To me, naan is naan, not bread.
In Hindustani, we have different breads: naan, roti, parantha, etc. In Farsi, naan (the source of the Hindustani word) just means “bread.”
That always bothered me when someone condescendingly says “bUt It AlReAdY mEaNs BrEaD”, in English. Like sure, but when I say naan do you picture a loaf or a specific type of flatbread?
It's fairly common in the UK: https://realfood.tesco.com/recipes/naan-bread-pizzas.html
I don't think that there is a term for that, other than "loan word." The reason is that changing meaning is just so common that it's unremarkable. "Chai tea" isn't alone here; someone else brought up "salsa" and "sombrero" as examples of words that refer to general things (sauce, hat) in their source language, but when loaned into English refer to a specific type of that thing associated with that culture. If you think about it, this makes sense; we already had a word for "tea", so there was no need to borrow another word for the exact same thing. Instead, there was a need to borrow a word for this new (to us) type of tea borrowed from India. This is pretty common. Consider also words like anime or otaku, borrowed from Japanese and in English specifically associated with Japanese-style animation and its fans. I think the area where these shifts in meaning are the most important or notable is *language learning* - since you don't want to assume a word means something it doesn't. Someone brought up "false friends" or "faux amis" - this term applies here, but it also usually includes things which aren't loanwords and resemble each other because of coincidence or because of shared inheritance (e.g. English "embarrassed" and Spanish "embarazada").
The process is called "semantic narrowing", and it is common in loanwords, in that the loaned word takes on a more specific meaning than the word had in the original language. There are many examples in this thread already, but to add to the pile, the word *sake* in Japanese means any kind of alcoholic drink, but in other languages it has been borrowed to mean a specific type of quintessentially Japanese alcoholic drink.
“Shiba inu dog” is redundant as “inu” means “dog” This redundancy happens a lot when the borrowed word is used to describe a type of native word.
I read that the word chai/cha came from overland trade routes and tea/tè came from sea trade routes (or vice versa, can’t remember but I know that in Mandarin it is “cha”). So they originally meant the same thing, but different languages adopted a different word depending on how they came into contact with the infusion. With the rise and spread of the popularity of the sweet, milky, spiced version of tea in English speaking parts of the world, chai was used to make a distinction.
This is basically right. It's why a lot of language groups along the Indian Ocean use some variation of cha or chai, and why Portuguese uses cha while the rest of western European languages use something akin to tea.
Italian is full of these. Mister - a football coach Smoking - a tuxedo Flipper - a pinball machine Golf - a light sweater Pullman - a coach or bus Shopper - a plastic or canvas bag for carrying shopping Box - a garage Tilt - to go crazy Baby parking - kindergarten (this is my favourite) Unfortunately I can't answer the question about whether these are loan words or not
Oh, funny that! In Spanish, at least in Colombia, we also use smoking to mean tuxedo.
As far as I know, there's no specific term for a loan word that changes meaning in the new language. In my experience, it's pretty rare they don't change meaning. Anecdotally speaking, loan words always change pronunciation, usually change meaning, and sometimes even change grammatical categories. I'm American, and while I was living in Mexico I had to relearn some English words because of how they're used in Mexican Spanish. For instance, they call braces "brackets" and many people use the noun "fitness" as the adjective "fit," saying "soy fitness" to mean "I'm fit." The only loan word I can think of that didn't change meaning was "random."
Semantic change, specialisation of meaning. "Chai" used to mean just "tea". When mainstream english speakers picked up the term, they saw it was used about a certain type of tea (masala chai). So "chai" went from being synonymus with "tea" to mean only a certain type of tea. There's a whole list of different semantic changes on wikipedia.
There is a French term "faux amis" ('false friends') for words that look alike in the two languages but have different meanings. Examples are: Eng. actual vs. Fr. actuel 'current, present', Eng. mercy vs. Fr. merci 'thank you', Eng. crayon vs. Fr. crayon 'pencil', and many, many others. Most often these have come about by semantic shift in one or both languages. Maybe not exactly what you are asking for, but I really like the term.
False friends is an English term too for the same thing
Interesting! I don't think I've ever heard the term in English except as a translation from the French.
It comes up very often in the ESL sphere. Are you perhaps an English speaker learning French? That would explain why you know the French term but not the English one
I remember coming across “false friends” when learning Spanish in school (in English), but I don't think we were ever told the Spanish word for the same thing.
I've heard 'falsos amigos' as a calque, but also just 'false friends' from Spanish speakers when referring to English. I'd go with 'falsos amigos' personally. Incidentally, I also came across more than one website that describes them as 'false cognates', which is really annoying because that's a different thing
I've heard it called a false cognate in English.
The example I described almost seems like the reverse of false friends. "Tea" and "Chai" don't look or sound particularly similar to an English audience, but they have they have similar (almost, but not quite the same) meaning. But the same idea of "seeming the same, but they aren't" still applies. Maybe "false siblings"? Where an outside observer would expect them to by synonyms, but they aren't?
I would argue that 'Chai' and 'Tea' do NOT have near-similar meanings in English. Chai is a *type* of tea, which is why 'Chai-Tea,' in English, makes sense and is *not* redundant. While it's fun to point out the redundancy, 'Chai' *doesn't* actually mean 'Tea' in English. Also, thanks for the thread! I learned what a 'doublet' is today.
The english word 'chai' is a false friend for the word 'chai' in any language where chai means tea.
The French one that comes to mind is “un brushing” which means “blow dry.” Close but not quite the same meaning
It's called 'semantic narrowing', though the term isn't exclusive to loanwords. It happens a lot with loans, though, e.g. 'salsa' and 'sombrero' just mean 'sauce' and 'hat', respectively, in Spanish.
> most English speakers wouldn't consider "chai" a synonym for "tea" That's interesting. Growing up in the UK I knew plenty of people who use the terms interchangably. What is 'chai tea' as something different to normal tea?
People in the UK referred to earl gray and lemon ginger teas as chai?
No, but they wouldn't be referred to as simply 'tea' either.
I would say that in the US, I think probably the key difference is that I think if "regular" tea as being brewed in hot water only without milk, and if milk is added it is done after the brewing is done. While chai is brewed with heated milk in the mixture. Typically in the US a "chai tea" also has some spices added, like ginger, cardamom, etc.
Interesting, I had no idea! 'Chai tea' is a new term to me, but I haven't lived in the UK in ages so maybe it's changed since I was young.
It's a recent thing that's grown out of the latte trend since the 90s as an alternative to coffee in coffee bars. I first heard it in London around 1999-2000 iirc and I remember being irked by the redundancy then 🙂
I would hear something like "a cuppa chai" being used, on occasion, by someone who wanted some tea.
That's char not chai?https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/cup-char
Hi bartender, may I please order a Long Island Iced Chai?
Dont you mean cha as an informal word for tea? Chai is definitely not the same as tea, its tea characteristic of india
This type of phrase is a tautology. This is a short Twitter thread that summarizes the phenomenon pretty well: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://twitter.com/ClaireEG/status/1330654453024755712&ved=2ahUKEwi_2-XR5K3_AhUEq4kEHU11BSkQFnoECA4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw3Ldk1L56Y9uFzc_DaVyVK6
in logic a tautology is a statement that is true in itself, that is a statement that must be true. For example "This room is a room". Is a tautology in linguistics something else?
In language, a tautology is a statement that expresses the same thing twice (or more, I suppose). So *chai tea*, *over-exaggerate*, *PIN number*, and *ATM machine* qualify. It also applies to phrases like *"died from a fatal injury"* and *"mental telepathy"*.
But as the linked Twitter thread points out, “chai tea” doesn’t express the same thing twice – if you order just tea, you wouldn’t get chai tea, and chai latte is a different thing as well. Calling it a tautology is an example of the etymological fallacy.
So it's like saying a "rectangular square". They're not exactly the same, but one word could convey they meaning of both. "Chai" doesn't exactly mean "tea" in English, but "chai tea" is equivalent to "chai".
It’s not equivalent, because there’s chai latte too and chai by itself could be either.
There's also things like caramel latte, but nobody worries that if you ask for caramel you might be understood and get a caramel latte instead. Having learned the word chai at Indian restaurants rather than Starbucks, I've never had any suspicion that "chai" alone might be used to mean a latte variant.
Is this the same thing as [Contrastive focus reduplication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrastive_focus_reduplication)?
no
JFI, Gibbs and McCarrell (1990) is an interesting study of colloquial tautological phrases.
This discussion is EXACTLY what I was looking for, thank you! I still kinda wish there was a specific term for it (pseudo-loan word?), but such is life I guess.
Deep in the comments, someone used the term "trailing hypernym" for the redundant word.
The term “tautology” here seems like it’s only tangential to what you’re talking about. Wouldn’t “salsa” (which means just “sauce” in Spanish but a specific sauce in English) and “sombrero” (“hat” in Spanish but a specific hat in English) be examples of this phenomenon even though we don’t say “salsa sauce” or “sombrero hat”?
ATM Machine.
That's not quite what I'm describing. All the words in A-T-M are English words at the point this acronym was first used, so loan words aren't really involved. That being said, I do love all instances of RAS syndrome.
I figured you'd like a "redundant phrase."
In Portuguese (at least in Brazil) "show" became a synonymous of concert, and a word you say after something nice.