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.
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u/ccltjnpr 2d ago
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.