“Semantic Differentiation” Explains Why “Chai Tea” Is Not Redundant

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Christina, and I’m calling from Phoenix, Arizona.

Hey, Christina, welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Well, I was hoping you could help settle a debate that elected on Facebook for me.

-oh. Okay, sure.

Well, a friend of mine posted a status that said something along the lines of,

Attention, it is chai, not chai tea, that is all.

And I chimed into that, and I said, well, you know, I don’t think here in America that’s really necessarily true.

And I simply said that I think it’s a way of specifying the kind of tea you want because, you know, there’s Earl Grey and Cameo and all kinds of tea.

And although the technical definition of chai is tea, that’s not necessarily how the word is used here.

And my friend replied to that saying, well, you don’t say Coke soda or steak beef.

And his argument was that it was redundant.

Now, a bunch of his friends chimed in, and a lot of this was taken up with them explaining, no, actually, chai in a lot of Asian countries, the meaning is tea, and it’s a specific kind of tea with spices.

And I kept saying, no, I have no qualm with the definition of chai being tea.

I totally agree with that.

I just don’t think that’s – it’s not redundant because of how it’s used here in America.

So I was just hoping you could shed some light on that.

I think you’re right. I think you’re totally right.

Yeah, because it was like me against 10 people.

I know, but the thing is, this debate is so fierce.

Is chai tea redundant that there have been editing wars on Wikipedia,

And they’ve literally taken over the chai page and redirected it to Masala chai?

Because the pedants there will not let this go.

They just will not let this go.

That’s what I said. I said, English is a beautiful language.

You’re all being, you know, I said, they all said you’re using it wrong.

And I said, why? Because I don’t want English to just be this stoic, you know, pedantic language.

Here’s the mistake that they’re making. They’re not Chinese. They’re not Indian. They’re not Russian.

They’re not Persian. They’re American. And we borrowed this word imperfectly, admittedly.

But now it is what it is. And chai means a spiced tea in this country. And that’s that.

And you can say, oh, in India, it means something else. Well, in India, fine. Go speak Hindi and Urdu and go to India.

But in English, in the United States, right now, chai tea is a particular thing.

And it’s a real thing.

And chai is fine.

You can say chai, but just because it means only tea in another country doesn’t mean we’re beholden to it.

That is what we call the etymological fallacy.

It’s an etymological fallacy to think that a word must only have its original meaning and that’s it for all time.

It just doesn’t work that way.

So tell them to have a tuna fish sandwich with their chai tea.

Yeah.

And they’re wrong about beefsteak.

We do say beefsteak because you also have porksteak, at least where I’m from in St. Louis.

Right?

And the soda example is wrong, too.

People say soda pop.

That means soda soda or pop pop, depending where you’re from.

Oh, that’s true.

I hadn’t thought about that.

Yeah, there’s a ton of places where we specify like that.

So you’re basically saying, you know, there’s no redundancy there.

I mean, yes, chai is a specific kind of tea.

So by saying chai, you said tea.

But, you know, I mean, my whole thing was it was basically just a specification.

We have this thing in English called semantic differentiation, where we already had the word for T, right?

And then British soldiers in Asia encountered the word chai everywhere they went.

It was in Malaysia. It was in India. It was in what is now Iraq or now in Iran.

It was in China, which is where the word chai originally comes from.

And this word for T spread to all these countries.

They brought it back.

However, when they brought it back, they brought it back attached only to the spiced tea from a particular part of India.

Right.

And that is how we got that word.

So we already had a word for tea.

We didn’t need another word for tea.

We weren’t going to start calling tea chai.

So what we did is we said, oh, well, how about we just take this word chai and make it only mean this particular kind of spiced tea?

And this is ordinary.

We do this all the time in English.

The history of English is loaded.

For example, meat used to mean any food.

And then we decided, once we started encountering more French, we decided that meat would start to mean only the stuff that comes off of animals that’s made out of their muscles, right?

And we have a ton of these words where we started specializing and specifying that we’re going to restrict their meanings and narrow them down in order to avoid what is called semantic collision, where you have two words that mean exactly the same thing.

So even when we think that we have two words that are similar, we start to push them apart so that they start to not confuse us.

So anyway.

So, Christina, I think your linguistic loins are now girded, right?

Yes, I feel very validated because, really, people piled on.

I mean, there were people from all around the world, like, chiming into this.

They got up to 81 comments.

Oh, my goodness.

And there was just lonely little me saying, no, no.

Well, Christina, we appreciate your calling.

Well, thank you so much for your time.

I really appreciate it, especially since I was right.

That helps.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language disputes, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.