After 3 years of traveling alone and spending 2 years telling others how to do it, I did something as stupid as forgetting my bag in the bottom luggage hold of the bus after I got down at Kyoto station on the freezing cold morning of 27th January, 2012.
Luckily, I realized this within less than 2 minutes of getting down, and thus began a series of frenzied calls to a ‘Japanese Only’ emergency number. If I could talk in English with them, I would probably have shouted something like _Stop the fucking bus!_ (which is of course optimistic to the point of ridiculousness—a Japanese driver would donate his only kidney more readily than delay public transport). But my Japanese is only good enough to convey what I want to convey in a gentle, civil fashion, so I did just that. I calmed down, and explained to him what had happened. Finally, I did get my luggage back, due in part to Japan’s efficient and speedy goods delivery services, not to mention the inherent niceness of the people here. And there goes another ‘experience’ in the pool, and next time I tell juniors not to forget their luggage, I will have a first-hand story to narrate.
So, what had this got to do with linguistics? Nothing, really, but I was feeling a bit ashamed of myself, and thought that a visit to the Linguistrix confession box would help.
But what happened later that day _does_ have to do with linguistics. Just before catching the train from Nara to Kyoto, I headed into a convenience store and, among other things, grabbed this:
To tell you the truth, I was driven more by curiosity than anything else. In the few tens of milliseconds it took me to read the label and process it, I wondered what coffee flavored with strawberries would taste like. I like both coffee and strawberries, but I had this lingering suspicion that mixing them wouldn’t be that great an idea. What better way to judge this than try it out, I thought, as I grabbed it and proceeded to the checkout queue.
But as I stood on the escalator on the way to the platform and looked at the image on the tetra-pack, I began to think about what it was that I had purchased.
Now, this is a rather interesting issue. _Latte__ _is an Italian word and literally just means _milk_ (and is cognate words such as lactation). The full name for a coffee with milk, i.e. espresso with milk, is Café Latte or Caffè latte (café au lait in French)
But latte is an Italian word, and as far as English is concerned, it’s been lexicalized to mean coffee with milk, not just milk. A Hazelnut Latte generally means a Latte with hazelnut syrup (and a 30% rise in price), not milk with hazelnut syrup. A _skim latte_ is not skim milk, but latte made from skim milk. Likewise, a cinnamon latte, is not cinnamon flavored milk (tasty though it would be), but a milk coffee with cinnamon added to it. But is this terminology only specific to the coffee industry, or is it now universal in the English speaking world? I would go with the latter. I have never seen latte being used in English to refer to milk alone, and If you go to a McDonalds and say that you want a latte along with whatever variety of deep fried meat and starch you’ve ordered, you will be given a coffee, not a tetra-pack of milk (though a lot of McDs do offer milk).
So, what would a Strawberry Latte be? A latte flavoured with strawberries (à la hazelnut latte), or strawberry milk? As far as usage of the word latte in English goes, I think there is no doubt that it should be the first option. In fact, Starbucks actually has a drink of this name, which it describes as “Our classic rich, full-bodied Starbucks® espresso in steamed milk lightly topped with foam and complemented by your customers’ favorite Fontana® flavors.”, where Fontana is apparently a brand of strawberry syrup.
The Strawberry Latte I bought was, as you’d have guessed, just strawberry flavored milk.