No. It sounds awkward to my ear, because that’s not how the term is used where I live, but I don’t expect the nuances of my culture to be observed universally.
Are you a Spanish speaker?
Here’s one in English from up thread. And English word made redundant with a German word. Should I care about that?
This happens all the time:
Just a few words and phrases. My father’s fluent, though, as are his two brothers. And I live in California, which is effectively a bilingual state.
Do you happen to come across it frequently? Do you understand and use both languages? I’m saying that there’s a pretty large intersection between Hindi and English speakers(and apparently, chai is a pretty universal word for tea, so I’m limiting matters by saying Hindi here). The other situations aren’t strictly comparable. I don’t know how to present this, in the expectation that the majority of you are monolingual.
I consider two languages to be my first language, as do millions of my countrymen(Hindi and English are the two official languages of India). So I have a stake in both languages. When you, in ignorance, use a word from one of these in a nonsensical way in the other, I think I have a legitimate position in saying that it’s ignorant and nonsensical, and should be scotched.
Well, then it guess you’ve narrowed the conditions down pretty tight to apply to you and this situation.
All I know is I’ve never heard an Italian speaker complain of pizza pie, but I’m sure there’s a reason that situation also isn’t the same.
It bugs you. Ok. Sorry it does.
Do you know many bilingual Italians?
It’s my expectation that a Bilingual speaker would consider Salsa sauce silly/wrong. I could be mistaken of course.
Seriously? In the New York metro area (like Brooklyn!)? 100s, at least.
The best man in my wedding was born and raised in Mumbai. Came here for grad school. I gotta ask him his take on this…
Did they come across the meaning of pizza as America thinks of it(i.e born and raised there)? In which case, they would have no reason to think of pizza pie as odd.
Well, that’s where you’re wrong. You don’t have a legitimate right to say that a particular word is being used “wrong.” Not in English. Not in Hindi, either. That’s not how languages work. Languages are not created by dictate, they’re an emergent property of human social interaction. Saying that it’s wrong for a word to have a certain meaning is a bit like saying the tide is wrong for eroding a cliffside. “Correct” or “incorrect” doesn’t enter into it. It’s just something that happens.
Cool.
So fluent is no longer enough to have their opinion be valid. Now they must be raised in the other country too. At what age would immigrating here be acceptable? :rolleyes:
As my mom would say, Oy gevalt.
And arguing for or against it being right or wrong is part of how it ‘happens’.
No, she definitely says “chai” - rhymes with “fly”. She did live in London for a time but was born and raised in Great Yarmouth (actually Gorleston-on-Sea).
Not really, no.
And, similarly, “kielbasa sausage” should sound stupid to my native Polish and English ears, but it doesn’t, because I realize contextually, kieblasa in English means a type of smoked Polish sausage. It’s not really dumb to me, because we are talking about two different contexts. English words have been similarly bastardized and corrupted in other languages, and I gave you an example that’s pretty much directly analogous to yours in Hungarian going the other way (English word into Hungarian.) It never sounded silly to me in that context, either, even though the word translates basically into “bacon bacon.”
It doesn’t sound all that weird to me when borrowing words and phrases from other languages that if there is a type of item that is associated strongly with that culture, the use of the generic word in that language can be taken to mean the more specific “famous” item in the target language. Like in the Polish community, they were famous for their smoked sausages, so the Polish word generically for sausage, kielbasa, got associated with that specific sausage. Now, “chai” and its various spelling variants (like čaj in a number of Slavic languages) simply means “tea.” Had, say, the Croatians been known for some interesting and uniquely spiced tea and not the Indian subcontinent, it would not have surprised me that English speakers would have glommed on to that word and used it to refer to this special Croatia tea, even though the word is generic in Croatian. It’s not a matter of cultural or linguistic imperialism or any nonsense such as that. It’s just natural linguistic drift, and happens in other languages in all directions. I know I’ve seen more examples of this in Hungarian and Polish, but I’m blanking on them right now.
And you also see it going the other way, from specific in one language to general in another. The immediate example that comes to mind has to do with brand-names, but one of the general words in Polish for gym shoes/sneakers is “adidasy,” after, obviously “Adidas.” But then you get such seeming nonsense as “adidasy Nike”, literally, “Nike Adidases”. Languages are funny that way.
If three people at the table order “cha” in sequence, do you then have to get up and dance?