I believe Collins is UK-based. As I mentioned, chilli is the preferred British spelling. The word is derived from the Nahuatl chilli, spelled in Spanish as chile. The most common form in American English is probably chili, though chile is also used. As asterion mentions, in some places there is a distinction made between chili for the food and chile for the plant, but this is not universal.
In the case of chile/chili con carne it is debatable which form should be used. In Spanish chile con carne would be correct. (Neither of my Spanish-English dictionaries, Collins or American Heritage, offers chili as a possibility in Spanish.) However, given that the dish is not Mexican in origin but rather Tex-Mex, the use of the American English spelling in the Spanish phrase may not be inappropriate in view of its hybrid origin.
Noone Special, you’re right about Arabic. Its cognates with the corresponding Hebrew words are really close.
Arabic for temperature-hot is hârr, but another word that means temperature-hot is hâmm, related to Hebrew ham which you cited. In Hebrew, the latter word could mean ‘warm’ as well as hot. In Arabic, the same root gives words like humá ‘fever’, hammah ‘hot spring’, and hammâm ‘bath’.
The Arabic word for temperature itself is harârah, literally ‘hotness’, from the same h-r-r triliteral root as hârr.
Whereas the word for pungent taste in Arabic is hirrîf, cognate of the Hebrew word harif you cited, which literally means ‘sharp’. It’s from the same root as harf, which means ‘cutting edge’. Another Arabic word with similar meaning is hâdd, which also refers to the sharpness of a cutting edge, related to hadîd ‘sharp edged’, also ‘iron’. (Because iron takes a sharper edge than bronze; from this is derived the Arabic name Haddâd, ‘Smith’.)
Sound Symbolism Dept.: Can’t help noticing that all these words for hotness start with the same letter, H, the 6th letter in the Arabic alphabet. It’s a pharyngeal sound that doesn’t exist in English. It’s made by forcing air out through the narrowed pharynx, making a sharply hissing sound in the middle of the throat. The sound you might make if you had suddenly eaten a too-hot chili pepper.
Well, it is fair to say, that, much like the Americans and the Brits, we really are (or should have been, anyway :() two nations separated by a (almost) common language
The problem here, if anything, is not that English lacks the words, but that they’re not “everyday”. But that’s an entirely subjective matter. We do have words “piquant”, “spicy”, “zesty”, and “peppery”, and on the other end, you could use “caloric”, “thermal”, “heated”, “piping”, or “steaming”. If you’re saying we don’t use those words enough, well, the solution is simple: Let’s all start using them more!
But none of these words really conveys the idea of “hot enough to blow the roof of your mouth off” (which is how I like my food :)) All these words signify - at least to me - a more “genteel” form of spiciness. Real Men[sup]TM[/sup] don’t eat their food piquant - we want it to clear our nasal passages out completely, and we don’t want to have to repeat the procedure this winter!
Yep. But not completely ambiguous because “karai” can also mean so salty it stings or just too salty. But when “kara” is used in such formes as “gekikara” (extremely spicy) it’s unambiguous.
The Hindi word comes from the Arabic masâlih (there’s that H again), literally meaning ‘ingredients’. It’s the plural of maslah, which means whatever is needed to make something good.
I looked up tîkha in the Hindi dictionary and it says this word means ‘sharp’ in various senses, cf. tez. It comes from Sanskrit tîkshna, which is derived from the same Sanskrit root as tejas, meaning ‘sharp’. From this root comes words for the various strong tastes: tikta ‘bitter’, tîkshna ‘sharp, hot, pungent, fiery, acid’.
The Proto-Indo-European source of Sanskrit tejas etc. and Persian tez is the root *steig- ‘to stick; pointed’. It gave us the words stick, stake, steak, stigma, thistle, and tiger, to take a few examples. Ironically, this same root gave us the word raita, which in Indian cuisine today usually means a dish of yogurt with cucumbers, just the antidote to cool a fiery chili attack. Originally, though, raita must have been very spicy; it comes from Sanskrit rajikatiktaka, meaning ‘mustard pickle’. Rajika is Sanskrit for mustard, and tiktaka refers to one of those strongly-flavored Indian pickles with the intensely sour, salt, and spicy flavors all at once.
Another word derived from the same Indo-European root is distinguish, from the Latin ‘to separate’ (the idea of a “sharp” blade dividing one thing from another). So lovers of hot chili pepper can take pride in their literally distinguished tastes. The sharpness of the pungent chili “distinguishes” the bland eaters from the truly hot ‘n’ spicy people.
[hijack]It may be worth noting that the root of the word maslah is S.L.H (or {TS}.L.H, in Hebrew) - literally meaning “success, successful”. The “m” at the beginning is a prefix, not part of the root.
In Hebrew The related root S.L.H (“S” instead of “TS” as the first letter) means “pardon” or “forgiveness” - relating the terms success and forgiveness. To forgive is to succeed - perhaps words for life.
One of these roots figures (I’m not sure which) in the name of the medieval Arab leader Saladin (more properly known as Salah-a-din) - so he was “Successful”, or “Forgiving” (or both).
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It’s, “Lat.” Lat with a higher tone is temperature hot, and with a quick falling tone (I’m playing this by ear) is spicy food hot. And since Chinese is a tonal language, they’re two totally different words, not one word with different meanings because of the tone stress.
I always thought the Mandarin pronunciation was more or less the same? “La.” Never heard this tang thing, but I’m not a native Mandarin speaker.
can you elaborate? i can’t place the temperature hot for ‘lat’. i use ‘yid’ for temperature hot. the character for spicy hot 辣 is the same for mandarin or cantonese, though the pronounciation is different.
烫 translates to ‘scald’, the word itself is ‘soup’ over ‘fire’.
