I think most Americans would answer “I have no idea WTF ‘ahi’ is.” 
I’m in Boston, and I have never heard anyone call it pizza pie.
Kind of the opposite situation: hamburger. If you want a ham sandwich, you ask for a “ham sandwich” not a “ham” So shouldn’t it be “hamburger sandwich”?
I would caution anyone against calling it that, however. You will only annoy your friends and confuse the cashier at McDonalds. That is personal experience talking.
I seem to remember a show on the Food channel about pizza that said calling it pizza pie was confusing to customers because they were expecting something closer to apple pie. So they just dropped the “pie” because they were tired of explaining it. Apparently, there was a bit of a learning curve for pizza in the 1950s.
Although I always just called it “pizza” while growing up in Ohio, I remember commercials for the Pizza Pie game. These ads both reflected and influenced the use of the repetitive term.
Funny thing is I have always called (the canned stuff) Tuna and so has the wife. But both of our sons who have lived with us full time since they were just a gleam, call it tuna fish.
Where did they get it? They don’t even know, they think I am weird for calling it tuna.
MacGyver.
Must be regional. In Hawaii, we just say tuna. This fact made me lose a contest once, because I answered simply “tuna sandwich”.
They didin’t use to have ham slices. They do now, but it’s considered a Western thing, like sandwiches and even bread itself. Otherwise, pork is mostly just put into these odd little Thai sausages or fried up in rice dishes and the like.
Q: Why do Americans call it ‘tuna fish’ instead of just ‘tuna’?
My answer: 'Cause we’re stupid.
Further evidence: Taco Bell commercials invariably refer to ‘carne asada steak’ in the pitch. I know we’re not all native Spanish speakers–not yet, anyway–but it really doesn’t take that much wit and experience to figure out that ‘carne asada’ by itself means ‘steak.’
Shouldn’t be so complicated. But apparently it is.
By your definition, then Thais are especially stupid, since they use “fish”, “color”, etc, with everything. They always name the overall category with the specific type in general conversation.
There, there, it’s okay. But don’t forget that to buy your carne asada steak, you need to stop at the ATM machine first and enter your PIN number to get some cash money to buy your dinner food with.
Not so. I don’t make that judgment about Thais, because I don’t have any knowledge about the syntactical and linguistic necessities of their language. For all I know, their language requires that structure to convey the concept in question.
But I know that such redundancies are not necessary in English. I stand by my assessment.
That’s good stuff. Pats on the back for coming up with all those examples.
Nitpick: Of course, those are straight redundancies. The N in PIN means “number.” The M in ATM means “machine.”
Same goes for people who say “hamburger meat”. As opposed to what - hamburger yogurt? Hamburger chocolate? Hamburger potatoes?
If you bought simply “hamburger” people might think you were buying the entire burger, rather than the raw ingredients you use to prepare the meat part of the hamburger with.