seasonofprophecy asked:

If you were to look at the languages of Asia and Europe, you would see that many languages' word for tea is something like chai (Mandarin/Korean/Portuguese cha, Persian/Russian/Turkish chay, etc). It is repetitive to say "chai tea", even if chai does refer to a specific kind of tea. There is enough of a consistent difference between French tea and American or British tea to denote when tea is French, but nobody thinks thé tea is a legitimate phrase, and nobody would naturally think to use the phrase. There are people that see the French word thé's immediate linguistic proximity to the English word tea and recognize the redundancy there, but Francophones are also generally believed when they acknowledge a poor use of their language. Just because chai's linguistic proximity to the English word tea is less apparent to those who don't consider the presence of exchange between European and Asian languages doesn't mean chai tea isn't not repetitive and dismissive to Indians criticisms on Americans' use of the word chai

c-rowlesdraws:

your bio says you’re southeast asian so I’m not going to tell you you can’t be critical of foreigners’ use of a word from your region. But also anything I could say to defend my (really harmless I think??) take on chai as a loan word is overshadowed by the fact that it’s now been two days of people reacting to that post and I’m tired. Many words enter other languages for various reasons and the way that other language folds them into itself is shaped by quirks of grammar, human communication, and that word’s purpose in its new language, not conscious disrespect. All languages have loan words in them that are used in ways that seem “strange” or “wrong” to native speakers of the language that word came from.

But I will say that I do not implicitly respect the French, and also if anyone asked me to make them “French style tea” I’d have no idea what they meant.