In English people will often say their food is hot or spicy, but it can be unclear what they mean.
My food is hot. - Does that mean the food is hot from chile or hot from temperature?
My food is spicy. - Does that mean the food is spicy from chile or has a lot of different spices in it?
Do other languages have this ambiguity or do they have a distinct word which means “hot from chiles”?
Tagalog differentiates the two:
anghang - spicy hot
init - temperature hot
There are similar terms in other Philippine languages and, I imagine, most other related languages in the region.
I don’t agree that “My food is spicy” is ambiguous. If a food has a lot of spices but none of them are hot (hmm…turmeric?), I don’t know anyone who would call it “spicy”. “Well-seasoned”, maybe.
Spanish: picante means spicy, caliente means plain old hot. Most Latin-derived languages probably have similar pairs of words (“spicy” and “scalding” in English).
Spanish differentiates. Picante means spicy-hot, while caliente means hot in temperature.
In Szechwan restaurants, I have sometimes heard the word “pungent” used to describe chile-hot dishes. However, the phrase “Man, that sure is a pungent curry!” doesn’t seem to convey what we’re looking for here.
I’ve heard things like apple cider and spaghetti sauce referred to as spicy, although neither are spicy-hot.
My original question came about because someone told my daughter the apple cider was spicy, and then she didn’t want to try it. I was having trouble describing to her how the apple cider wasn’t spicy from chiles–rather it’s from the orange and nutmeg.
In Thai, heat hot is rawn, spicy hot is phet (with a p and aspirated h, not f sound like English).
I’ve often wondered about this. As big a vocabulary as English has, and still people say “spicy hot” and “temperature hot.”
Off the top of my head, I think that Hindi/Urdu (oddly enough) doesn’t distinguish between the two. Garam (garmi) is both “temperature hot” and “pepper/chile hot”. “Spicy” in the sense of “flavored with spices” is “masala”, but it doesn’t necessarily refer to hot spices.
In Bengali –
temperature hot is gorom
chile hot is jhal
and the nose clearing hot you get from mustard, horseradish, and wasabi is jha~j
“Scalding”…word for the day!
chile heat in Hindi is “mirch”
English has borrowed the Japanese word umami for ‘full-tasting due to the presence of glutamate salts, such as in foods flavored with soy sauce’. That’s one of the non-traditional tastes; the other major one is ‘hot because of capsaicin’, which doesn’t really have a word that I can think of in English. Maybe ‘fiery’ would work but ‘hot’ and ‘spicy’ are certainly ambiguous. If someone asks if you like spicy foods, though, they mean chile/habernero/jalapeno spicy, not whether you like anise or cloves. ‘This chili is really spicy’ means spicy-because-of-chile too. You wouldn’t normally call something ‘spicy’ unless it was because of capsaicin. ‘Hot’ is certainly ambiguous; I used ‘thermally hot’ and ‘chemically hot’ when it’s not clear.
It’s interesting that all these languages of cultures known for spicy food do differentiate between the two different kinds of hot. (In English, then, you’d expect that we would differentiate between ‘bland due to lack of spice’ or ‘bland because it was boiled’, or ‘fried in a pan’, ‘fried in oil’, ‘fried in bacon drippings’, ‘fried just to prove we could do it’, and so on =)) I think English should borrow one of these. Picante is probably the best candidate since it’s from an Indo-European language. (It’s been borrowed to an extent, and there’s also ‘piquant’ from French.) You can imagine what many Americans would do with jhal or phet (especially with an aspirated p). (“Hope y’all like pet food!”)
Korean differentiates as well, with me-wuh being spicy hot, and do-gu-wuh being temperature hot. I always thought the English way of doing things was kind of awkward. It’s like there wasn’t a differentiation between the two originally.
It’s not ambiguity; It’s metaphor. It’s idiomatic.!!
I’ve heard apple cider referred to as spiced, but never as spicy. When I think of spicy, it is unambiguously referring to having spices that make it taste “hot.”
I’ll weigh in with Mandarin - there are different words for “temperature hot” (tang) and “spicy hot” (la).
Different types of “spicy” are also differentiated (e.g. the typically Sichuan pepper makes your dish “numbing” - a different description than the hot from jalepeno-type pepper).
Yes. Um, perhaps you might look that one up. Word for the day and all like that - I don’t think it means what I think you think it means, to borrow a line.
As others have noted a bit vaguely, the Spanish picante refers to the hotness caused by peppers or whatnot. If something is highly spiced with cumin and coriander, a Spaniard is not gonna call it “picante”. Because it isn’t. In the U.S, that word is likely to evoke a joke about lynching, because of a well-known trademark and a rather amusing advertising campaign.
No English word that I know of refers to this specifically, although “spicy” generally gets the point across - as opposed to “spiced” or “seasoned”. “Hot” works just fine in the appropriate context, but is certainly ambiguous in some cases. “I have a bushel of hot peppers” would not cause confusion, but “Here’s a bowl of hot chicken stew” might worry the recipient over whether it’s piping hot or seasoned with green chili peppers.
“Spicy” can, of course, refer to cinnamon, as well. I’ve never seen it used to refer to anything except peppers (and their derivatives like paprika) or cinnamon. The strict definition allows for any spices, and in fact includes “zestiness”, which refers to the flavor imparted by dried citrus rinds.
For what it’s worth, the Scoville Scale refers to the relative pepper-hotness of various, well, peppers (bells measure zero, pure capsaicin rings in at, like, fifteen million). On the other hand, ‘1500 scovilles’ is not descriptive to anyone who isn’t terribly obsessed with the topic anyway. And it’s a wierd scale in the first place – divide everything on it by 100 and you still get whole numbers.
The only other word I can dredge up, as much as it might bemuse me, is the adjective “buffalo”. That, in my mind, calls forth the idea of an unholy admixture of peppers and vinegar, the likes of which can only be diluted with equal quantities of beer and sorrow, plus maybe a little ranch-style dressing as a dip. The vinegar and artificial orange color make me shy away from it as a more general term, but it’s worth a passing mention.
Ultimately, I think “spicy” will have to serve duty as the English version of “picante” until we catch on, and to hell with you cinnamon-lovers. I would not be the least bit surprised if, in a generation or so, “buffalo” took over formal duty in that regard, but for now I think we have to wing it. Uh, so to speak.
German does too
Heat hot= Heiß=hot
Spicy hot= Scharf=Sharp
You also use it for Sharp Cheese, but in German there is another differentiation between spicy used in the more traditional sense for us… I don’t really know why, honestly, because I never ate any spicy food that wasn’t Doener Kebap.
People, you mean ‘chili’, not "chile’, right? ‘Chile’ is that long narrow country in South America. 