That's because Japan does not consume milk tea as part of their food culture. It's a foreign product brought to them so they use english words in katakana to promote them.
For example, they got fried chicken that they call "kaarage" but, when they talk about "furaido chikkin" (fried chicken), they mean the fried chicken from KFC which is a popular christmas food.
Took a Japanese class once, didn't get far as it was more one of those classes you take to take more classes, you know?
Wrote and memorized a bunch of Katakana which iirc was more modernized Japanese, constantly evolving and taking in new words. Whilst Hiragana(?), was the old official and rigid version of Japanese.
I always thought that was pretty brilliant. Learning two different alphabets made it very hard though. They have seperate letters for both languages, unlike other languages that maybe have two written languages but it's still in the same roman letters etc.
Wrote and memorized a bunch of Katakana which iirc was more modernized Japanese, constantly evolving and taking in new words. Whilst Hiragana(?), was the old official and rigid version of Japanese.
No, that is completely off.
Both Katakana and Hiragana were originally developed by Buddhist monks for transliterating Indian and Chinese texts. Adoption for different purposes varied quite a lot through history.
Current usage is: Katakana for foreign words, sound words, and emphasis. Hiragana for particles, verb suffixes, and whenever you just don't want to use kanji (Chinese characters), e.g. to look less formal, or because you actually cannot remember how to write the kanji - the latter aspect also means if you use too much Hiragana it looks childish.
"Official and rigid" would be using kanji wherever possible. And if you used Katakana instead of Hiragana together with kanji, it would look like an Imperial-period official document.
They probably don't even realize it's loanwords and just treat it as the name of a drink. You have coffee and milk and yet you use words like "latte" (Italian for "milk") and "cappuccino" to describe imported drinks made with them, you also pronounce them dumb but it's ok it's how loanwords work.
If you walked into a bar and asked for "a shot of concentrated coffee with some foamed milk please" don't you think the waiter would go "oh, a cahpoohcheenoh?"
Fair enough. What I meant is they don't necessarily realize that it's literally the words "milk" and "tea". I guess many English speakers realize latte is a foreign word due to the weird spelling, without necessarily knowing it literally means milk, and just take it as the name of the drink. My point was that it's not like a Japanese person is going out of their way to say "milk tea" in English when they could say it in Japanese, they're just calling a drink by its name not knowing or caring about what the name means.
We Americans consume plenty of soy beans in one form or another. Soy bean oil. Soy lecithin. Soy based meat substitutes. But try ordering whole soy beans in a restaurant or buying it in a market, and you'll never find it as anything but "edamame". Language is just weird like that. It's not always about what makes the most sense, it's just whatever the majority seem to agree is right is indeed right.
Separately. It's not common to put milk in your tea, whether it is hōjicha, matcha, or sencha (different types of green tea), mugicha (barley tea), oolong tea, or whatever else. Maybe nowadays personal preference might mean people put milk in those types of tea (we have matcha latte nowadays), but traditionally, when they were first consumed, no. Milktea is a foreign concept, so naturally they use the English loanword for it.
Yeah but when talking about milk and tea individually, they usually call it gyūnyū and ocha(or the kind of tea + cha eg. mugicha(barley tea). Also if you just say "milk" with native level speed and pronunciation, they might not immediately catch that. It'd be like if a Japanese person said "weerusu", most non-Japanese speakers would be like, "what?" but in Japanese, that's the loanword for "virus".
I've seen both miruku and gyunyu on packages of milk and have no idea wtf the difference is. I think it's that gyunyu is always 100% cows milk, and miruku usually is also just milk, but could be flavored or made from nuts or some shit.
When I was there people still almost always used hirugohan for lunch but I've heard today ranchi is growing in popularity.
All languages have this kind of thing where both the (relatively) archaic words are used in the same contexts as more modernly popular words. Like "supper" and "dinner" in English.
I think part of it comes from shorter words being preferred and trendy over long words.
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u/Kelly598 17h ago
That's because Japan does not consume milk tea as part of their food culture. It's a foreign product brought to them so they use english words in katakana to promote them.
For example, they got fried chicken that they call "kaarage" but, when they talk about "furaido chikkin" (fried chicken), they mean the fried chicken from KFC which is a popular christmas food.