Chili or Chile?

The Howster said:
I believe you mean English English, the original non distorted version.
Click to expand...

The "original non distorted version" sounds a lot more like German than modern English. It's fine by me if you want to be a purist... but hardly a soul will understand a word that you say if you want to speak "the original non distorted version" of English. You might also want also want to look into the Battle of Hastings. It had some pretty profound effects on the "original non distorted version" of many things English. ;)
 
Oh gawd now we're talking all edumacated.... smart talk hurt little brain.............

Chili, chilli= stew soup thing.
Chile= a variety of peppers.
Chilly= cold.

English language makes no sense.... we have one word that can mean fifty things and have twenty different spellings.
Just my pea brain opinion.
 
Mulcahey said:
The "original non distorted version" sounds a lot more like German than modern English. It's fine by me if you want to be a purist... but hardly a soul will understand a word that you say if you want to speak "the original non distorted version" of English. You might also want also want to look into the Battle of Hastings. It had some pretty profound effects on the "original non distorted version" of many things English. ;)
Click to expand...

Yeh I was having a joke.

The US has changed the meanings of words, added Z's, or decided to change the spelling, e.g. sulfur instead of sulphur (I am already aware the f is now the standard) compared with the English us Englishmen speak.
 
Too late to save chili. SAVE QUESO!
 
The Howster said:
Yeh I was having a joke.

The US has changed the meanings of words, added Z's, or decided to change the spelling, e.g. sulfur instead of sulphur (I am already aware the f is now the standard) compared with the English us Englishmen speak.
Click to expand...


American English is more conservative or traditional in a lot of ways, e.g. the silent h in herb, or the continued use of the old participle gotten.

I believe "color" is actually the older spelling also. It came into English from the old French word "color," which came from the Latin word "color." Color and colour were both common spellings long before America existed, then the UK settled on colour and the US color. A lot of the spelling differences are actually from the UK trying emulate French spelling, moreso than the US changing things.

E.g.
The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) lists the -ise form separately, as "a frequent spelling of -IZE", and refuses to list the -ise spellings even as alternatives in the individual entries for words such as realize.[sup][37][/sup] It firmly deprecates usage of -ise for words of Greek origin, stating, "[T]he suffix..., whatever the element to which it is added, is in its origin the Greek -ιζειν, Latin -izāre; and, as the pronunciation is also with z, there is no reason why in English the special French spelling in -iser should be followed, in opposition to that which is at once etymological and phonetic." It maintains "... some have used the spelling -ise in English, as in French, for all these words, and some prefer -ise in words formed in French or English from Latin elements, retaining -ize for those of Greek composition."[sup][38][/sup] Noah Webster rejected -ise for the same reasons.[sup][39][/sup]
Click to expand...

And what's with British people adding mysterious r sounds to words. Idear, sawr, Claudier? What is that all about?

HH81Betterhalf said:
Oh gawd now we're talking all edumacated.... smart talk hurt little brain.............

Chili, chilli= stew soup thing.
Chile= a variety of peppers.
Chilly= cold.

English language makes no sense.... we have one word that can mean fifty things and have twenty different spellings.
Just my pea brain opinion.
Click to expand...

Spanish is the same way, as are probably all languages. For example, "ya" in Spanish can mean now, right now, already, later, soon, yet, not only, now that, since, or can express agreement or reassurance, or add emphasis, and is used a lot of colloquial expressions.
 
I don't quite follow what you are saying, nor am I sure which English people you have been listening to. We do have a lot of varied accents across the UK but we certainly pronounce the h in herb. We do not pronounce any R's in the words you suggested.

As for linking English, a language evolved from many others, with european languages, again those diverged from latin, I think all european languages and their links came about long before english being the spoken language of North America, which was settled by various European powers. I think it is the case that there are 2 English dialects in North America, American English and Canadian English.
 
other than a few words our northern neighbors use quite a similar system... oofta.

Now that I mention the word Oofta, I'm not sure if its even canadian in Origin...
 
The Howster said:
I don't quite follow what you are saying, nor am I sure which English people you have been listening to. We do have a lot of varied accents across the UK but we certainly pronounce the h in herb. We do not pronounce any R's in the words you suggested.
Click to expand...

I meant to say American English at the beginning of the post, I edited it. The silent h is the older and more traditional pronunciation.

As far as sawr and idear go...this is what I'm talking about.

A rogue 'r' demonstrates how rules of pronunciation can change. "Why do reporters and news readers say 'lore' for 'law' and 'sore' for 'saw' etc? It never used to happen."Web-reader Jean O'Rourke has spotted a bit of language change in action. Where words like saw and idea come before a vowel, there's an increasing tendency among speakers of British English to insert an 'r' sound, so that law and order becomes law-r and order and china animals becomes china-r animals. Linguists call this 'intrusive r' because the 'r' was never historically part of the word.
Click to expand...

http://www.bbc.co.uk...change3.shtml#A

Example, listen to A Day in the Life by The Beatles. "I sawr a film today oh boy." I also hear it a lot in Australian English. The Australian actor Peter Noble on the TV show Fringe is really bad about it.
 
The word "chile" or chili" is not of Spanish origin. The spaniards kept many indigenous names for the new world products with alterations in the pronunciation. They most likely got the name from the nahuatl speaking peoples of the central valley of Mexico, probably either the Mexica (Aztec) or the Tlaxcalans. Im my nahuatl-english dictionary there are two entries that refer to hot peppers; chillaltohcayotl and chilli. Chilli would be pronounced more like cheel as in cheese and lee (chil-li). Other words with nahuatl roots are tomato (xitomatl), chocolate (chocolatl), avocado (ahuactl), Mesquite (mizquitl). I prefer to use the word chile when referring to hot peppers or spicy hot sauce. Salsa for me means only sauce, hot or mild, whether or not it has tomatoes or chiles. I would use chili for the U.S. dish.
 
I'v never heard news readers say 'lore' for 'law' and 'sore' for 'saw'. Chavs maybe.

Edit: I missed the American English bit
 
Tecolote said:
The word "chile" or chili" is not of Spanish origin. The spaniards kept many indigenous names for the new world products with alterations in the pronunciation. They most likely got the name from the nahuatl speaking peoples of the central valley of Mexico, probably either the Mexica (Aztec) or the Tlaxcalans. Im my nahuatl-english dictionary there are two entries that refer to hot peppers; chillaltohcayotl and chilli. Chilli would be pronounced more like cheel as in cheese and lee (chil-li). Other words with nahuatl roots are tomato (xitomatl), chocolate (chocolatl), avocado (ahuactl), Mesquite (mizquitl). I prefer to use the word chile when referring to hot peppers or spicy hot sauce. Salsa for me means only sauce, hot or mild, whether or not it has tomatoes or chiles. I would use chili for the U.S. dish.
Click to expand...

It is Spanish origin in the sense that it came into English from Spanish, not nahuatl. It's like saying the 7 Pod "originated" in Trinidad. If you go further back all chiles are from South America from an area in Brazil and surrounding countries, but it's common to say that 7 Pods originated in Trinidad. Saying the word isn't of Spanish origin is just semantics. You could say the word amigo is not of Spanish origin too, since it comes from the Latin "amicus." But it's probably not technically from Latin origin either, because it undoubtedly came from some other language before that. If you want to be technical we don't know the origin of any word because spoken language far out dates written history. The "chilli" nahuatl spelling is just a transliteration, since nahuatl doesn't use the Latin alphabet, so its transliterated spelling is irrelevant and is just to approximate the phonetics in another alphabet.

The English word avocado does not have nahuatl roots, it is a corruption of the Spanish word for lawyer, abogado, which comes from Latin (same root as the English word advocate). The Spanish word for avocado, aguacate, does come from nahuatl though.
 
Wild chiles originated in South America that is true, most the most current evidence shows that chiles were first domesticated in what is now Mexico. I am highly doubtful of your lawyer claim for the word avocado in english but i will look into that. Nahuatl isn't wriiten with the latin alphabet? What alphabet is it written in then? I'm looking at in right now and it is in the latin alphabet some of the the pronunciation rules are are different. The first accounts of Nahuatl in a written alphabet date to 1528 (classical Nahuatl) due to the Franciscan Friars attempts to convert the natives over to christianity. About the word chile; are you saying the nahuatl word went from Mexico back to Spain and europe then back to the U.S.A.? Europeans had no word for hot peppers i think Columbus called it "Pimienta roja" which means red pepper with black pepper as it's reference. I think what it comes down is how the word was introduced into the language which I'm assuming was mostly likely though contact with Mexicans and not Spaniards; Mexican Spanish incorporates many indigenous elements. Good comments got me riled up for a minute though.
 
As far as I know the current evidence is that c. annuum originated in Mexico, but the other domesticated species originated in South America and capsicum as a whole is believed to have originated in an area in Bolivia/Brazil which shows the greatest genetic diversity among wild forms. About halfway down there's a section on capsicum origin: http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1993/v2-132.html

Nahuatl didn't really have a proper alphabet before the Spanish came, just a primitive pictograph type of writing system, so I guess transliterated isn't the right word, I guess transcribed would be more appropriate. Attempts were made by the Spanish to represent the sounds of the language using the Latin alphabet, but there are no standard spellings and some of the sounds couldn't be properly represented using the alphabet. It's like saying which is the correct spelling, Osama or Usama? I remember when Bin Laden was killed and Fox ran stories spelling it Usama and people said they spelled it incorrectly. It's not an incorrect spelling, neither spelling is wrong they're just approximations of the Arabic pronunciation using Latin characters. There is no standard Latin orthography for Nahuatl and there are a lot of different spellings. I believe chilli has also been written as "xilli" in the Latin alphabet, it depends on who did the transcribing I suppose.

As for as I know the English word chile/chili came from Spanish (being spoken in Mexico) into English, not directly from Nahuatl into English. Just like coyote and tomato. Coyote came from the (Mexican) Spanish coyote, and tomato came from the (Mexican) Spanish jitomate/tomate, not directly from Nahuatl.

Can I ask why you have a Nahuatl-English dictionary, do you study the language? I noticed that your name means owl in Mexican Spanish, another word that comes from Nahuatl, the Mexicans I know use búho though. They use a lot of the Nahuatl-derived names for other animals though, e.g. opossum= tlacuache, buzzard= zopilote. Some of them call turkeys guajolotes.

And as for avocado
The modern English name derives from the Spanish form avocado, "advocate", which was formed as a folk etymology that substituted (and obscured) the Nahuatl origins of the word. The earliest known written use in English is attested from 1697 as "Avogato Pear", a term which was later corrupted as "alligator pear".[sup][9][/sup] The "advocate"-form appears in several other Germanic languages, such as the German Advogato-Birne, the Swedish advokatpäron, the Danish advokat-pære and the Dutch advocaatpeer.[sup][10][/sup] It is known as "butter fruit" in parts of India.[sup][11][/sup] In China it is known as è lí (鳄梨, a direct translation of "alligator pear") or huángyóu guǒ (黄油果, "butter fruit").
Click to expand...
 
My dad always said "Warsh the dishes". Is that Nahuati derived? Old or new English? American or Canadian? Did it come from China? ;)

As I said before I cannot believe this thread is still alive. Let it go.....just let it go. Go on now.
 
My grandfather spoke Nahuatl but it's disadvantages to be associated with Indigenous culture in Mexico (Mexicans have been and still are encouraged to disavow connections with it). He eventually lost use of his native tongue and never taught his children. Avg Mexican is about 75% indigenous, but usually are only proud of their European ancestry, a sad remnant of colonialism. I'd like to formally study the language but I'm left to look over books every once in a while when i have time, it's a way to connect with my roots i guess. You are right there was no alphabet, classical Nahuatl was extensively transcribed and written in by both Spaniards, and the indigenous people who spoke it. Many regional dialects exist this can account for the variation in pronunciation among different areas, but classical Nahuatl is pretty standardized though; from what I've read a few variants on how the sounds are represented exist and how to represent the glottal stops, but how sounds that are supposed to be heard are well known. It is the most widely spoken native language of the Americas. Thanks for the question one of my favorite topics.
 
Just an observation here... when a spoken language is put onto paper by phonetically writing the spoken work, just look at what can happen....


One phrase "wash the car" , spoken by different stereotypes



hillbilly male- warsh the karrr

southern lady- whaush thah cauh

Boston resident- (nasally) waaash the caaa

Proper British bloke- Would you please woash thah kah

New York City resident- Clean that piece of $#!& Up, NOW!


I do feel like Americans are the worst for destroying words and languages. No wonder our kids can't spell when they see mis-spelled words ALL THE TIME, in the name of advertizsing.

Kozy Kooler
wak-n-yak hair salon
Grillerz

the list is endless....... and modern technology isn't helping! ie...TXTNG


I think this thread has at least brought to attention, that in different areas of the world, the spelling for (that word) is different and is totally appropriate to where that person is from. Knowing that might also give readers a clue to where the writer is coming from that may not be listed in their profile.
:) Very informative discussion.
 
patrick said:
My dad always said "Warsh the dishes". Is that Nahuati derived? Old or new English? American or Canadian? Did it come from China? ;)

As I said before I cannot believe this thread is still alive. Let it go.....just let it go. Go on now.
Click to expand...

Some of us find this sort of thing interesting. I don't know where warsh comes from, but my mom used to say that too, along with crick (a small body of running water). :o
 
Avon Barksdale said:
Some of us find this sort of thing interesting.
Click to expand...

I definitely do.

I'm fascinated by language quirks and regionalisms. Things like couch/sofa, stoop/porch, tennis shoes/sneakers/trainers, soda/pop/coke, water fountain/drinking fountain/bubbler, standing in line/on line... all the little things like that fascinate the hell out of me. (I never claimed to be cool.)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top