12 ms·

Didn't the Japanese have bread or balconies before the Portuguese arrived? How does that work?

hmry 3y ago
How do people survive without bread? This may be hard to believe, but it is actually possible. The trick is eating something else. :) (They did have steamed grain products, just not baked ones.) Don't know about balconies.
- account42 3y ago
  > Don't know about balconies. I don't suggest eating balconies.
  - p3rls 3y ago
    UNLESS you're on a Japanese game show and it smells of chocolate
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  I didn't ask how people survive without bread. I asked whether the Japanese had bread before the Portuguese got there.
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    Steamed/baked wheat buns of various kinds have been eaten in China for a long time and are known in Japan as well under the name manju (饅頭). Wiki says they were first introduced in 1341, but they're still associated with Chinese food and typically served as sweet snacks with tea, not as a meal. Savoury meat buns (肉まん nikuman) do exist, but they're nowhere near as common as bao in China. There are also many cracker-like hard "breads" made from rice flour, notably sensei, but these too are snacks, not mains.
    - earthboundkid 3y ago
      Autocorrect changed senbei to sensei.
potatototoo99 3y ago
No they didn't have bread before the Portuguese arrived, but that's also to be expected given the prevalence of rice versus wheat.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  What, you can't grind rice, make flavour out of it, and bread out of that?
  - ricardobeat 3y ago
    Rice flour has no gluten, so no, you can’t use it like wheat to make bread. You can make cakes with rice though, which they did have. (When you see modern gluten-free bread in a bakery/supermarket, it’s still basically a cake recipe, tweaked to resemble the texture of bread)
    - rjsw 3y ago
      Gluten-free bread uses a binding agent, typically xanthan gum [1], a small amount of it is really noticeable when you are doing home baking. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum
  - anon291 3y ago
    I really encourage you to try this and see what happens. You need wheat to make bread. The only way to make leavened bread from rice is using highly processed synthetic ingredients to create the gluten structure.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
boomboomsubban 3y ago
According to the Japanese wiki page on bread, it was introduced in 1543 then banned as part of the Christian bans. They mostly ate whole grains, then used flour for noodles.
Lapha 3y ago
Japanese has a couple of words for 'door' (some of which refer to Japanese style sliding doors): 戸, 扉, 障子, but one of the more frequent ones is ドア which is a loan word from English 'door'. Adoption of loan words can be strange.
- 77pt77 3y ago
  They systematically use the English word for sex, yet I'm sure they'd been doing it far before contact with westerners.
- lioeters 3y ago
  That reminds me of something from a childhood TV show, an invention from the future called どこでもドア (the Anywhere Door). As for why they use a loan word for "door", I'm guessing it's due to the wide adoption of Western-style doors for which there's no equivalent word in Japanese. And why loaned from English instead of any other language, like Portuguese? I imagine it has some historical reason, related to which country such doors were originally imported from.
arghwhat 3y ago
Western-style fluffy bread was not present in Japan before Portuguese trade. The introduction through trade also applies to other eastern countries - China was exposed through the silk road, India through Portuguese and middle eastern trade. You have similarly surprising culinary events in the West. Tomatoes weren't introduced to Italy until the 16th century, an tomato sauce wasn't a thing before the 18th century - before that, pasta (itself assumed to come from Chinese noodles) was eaten dry with your fingers. Potatoes first arrived in Europe around the same time.
xdennis 3y ago
> Didn't the Japanese have bread or balconies before the Portuguese arrived? How does that work? I ask myself that every day. I think the answer is prestige. In my language, Romanian, many words are borrowed from English because there's no home-grown equivalent, like "hacker". But even common words are being replaced with English ones. E.g. fashion instead of modă, know-how instead of cunoștințe (knowledge), brand — marcă, however – însă (you know your language is in danger of disappearing when the conjunctions are being replaced). This is in spite of the fact that people can often hardly pronounce the English words, for example businessman is pronounced /biznismen/ (with no way to differentiate between man and men), or pronouncing "guard" as "goo-ard".
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Sure, there are loanwords that have become rooted in Romanian. But (unless one is part of a minority of people using English every day e.g. at work) a lot of those English words in Romanian are affectations of youth that disappear with age. The linguistic behavior of all my hipster friends changed radically as soon as they settled down into staid family life.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    Sometimes they don't disappear with age and they become the new standard for the next generation. If age-related reversion to the old way of speaking was a universal given then we wouldn't see half the linguistic drift that we do.
  - xdennis 3y ago
    I don't think they're affectations of the youth. Take the term "fake news". If journalists were in the business of informing people they would translate it ("știri false"), but they always say "fake news". You also hear experts use English terms because it makes them look more sophisticated. For example instead of saying the equivalent of "Ukrainians need to be trained to use American weapons" with all-Romanian words, you'll hear "Ukrainians need KNOW-HOW to use American weapons" with "know-how" being untranslated, even though this sentence is more awkward than the first one.
rendang 3y ago
I wonder this when I studied Russian and saw all the French/German loanwords. "Did the Russians not use to have screens/beaches/furniture before the Enlightenment?"
- demetrius 3y ago
  > Did the Russians not use to have screens/beaches/furniture before the Enlightenment? I don't know the evolution of the terms in question, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't! Like, what is a beach (or пляж)? It's basically берег (riverbank/seashore) but intended for recreation use. Did people of the past have enough time to recreationally use their seashores/riverbanks? I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. Same about furniture/мебель. I would assume that in the past (at least in the villages), people would often have benches, beds, tables custom-made specifically for their house, and they would not be meant to be moved out. Мебель/furniture presupposes that people produce it in one place, and then people move it to their house, and this was often not the case in the past. If your bed is made when your house is built, and cannot be moved out because bed frame goes directly into your wall, is that still furniture? Is furniture a useful word to describe that? (Not sure about screens)

hmry 3y ago

How do people survive without bread? This may be hard to believe, but it is actually possible. The trick is eating something else. :) (They did have steamed grain products, just not baked ones.) Don't know about balconies.

account42 3y ago
> Don't know about balconies. I don't suggest eating balconies.
- p3rls 3y ago
  UNLESS you're on a Japanese game show and it smells of chocolate
hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
I didn't ask how people survive without bread. I asked whether the Japanese had bread before the Portuguese got there.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  Steamed/baked wheat buns of various kinds have been eaten in China for a long time and are known in Japan as well under the name manju (饅頭). Wiki says they were first introduced in 1341, but they're still associated with Chinese food and typically served as sweet snacks with tea, not as a meal. Savoury meat buns (肉まん nikuman) do exist, but they're nowhere near as common as bao in China. There are also many cracker-like hard "breads" made from rice flour, notably sensei, but these too are snacks, not mains.
  - earthboundkid 3y ago
    Autocorrect changed senbei to sensei.

potatototoo99 3y ago

No they didn't have bread before the Portuguese arrived, but that's also to be expected given the prevalence of rice versus wheat.

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
What, you can't grind rice, make flavour out of it, and bread out of that?
- ricardobeat 3y ago
  Rice flour has no gluten, so no, you can’t use it like wheat to make bread. You can make cakes with rice though, which they did have. (When you see modern gluten-free bread in a bakery/supermarket, it’s still basically a cake recipe, tweaked to resemble the texture of bread)
  - rjsw 3y ago
    Gluten-free bread uses a binding agent, typically xanthan gum [1], a small amount of it is really noticeable when you are doing home baking. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum
- anon291 3y ago
  I really encourage you to try this and see what happens. You need wheat to make bread. The only way to make leavened bread from rice is using highly processed synthetic ingredients to create the gluten structure.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

boomboomsubban 3y ago

According to the Japanese wiki page on bread, it was introduced in 1543 then banned as part of the Christian bans. They mostly ate whole grains, then used flour for noodles.

Lapha 3y ago

Japanese has a couple of words for 'door' (some of which refer to Japanese style sliding doors): 戸, 扉, 障子, but one of the more frequent ones is ドア which is a loan word from English 'door'. Adoption of loan words can be strange.

77pt77 3y ago
They systematically use the English word for sex, yet I'm sure they'd been doing it far before contact with westerners.
lioeters 3y ago
That reminds me of something from a childhood TV show, an invention from the future called どこでもドア (the Anywhere Door). As for why they use a loan word for "door", I'm guessing it's due to the wide adoption of Western-style doors for which there's no equivalent word in Japanese. And why loaned from English instead of any other language, like Portuguese? I imagine it has some historical reason, related to which country such doors were originally imported from.

arghwhat 3y ago

Western-style fluffy bread was not present in Japan before Portuguese trade. The introduction through trade also applies to other eastern countries - China was exposed through the silk road, India through Portuguese and middle eastern trade. You have similarly surprising culinary events in the West. Tomatoes weren't introduced to Italy until the 16th century, an tomato sauce wasn't a thing before the 18th century - before that, pasta (itself assumed to come from Chinese noodles) was eaten dry with your fingers. Potatoes first arrived in Europe around the same time.

xdennis 3y ago

> Didn't the Japanese have bread or balconies before the Portuguese arrived? How does that work? I ask myself that every day. I think the answer is prestige. In my language, Romanian, many words are borrowed from English because there's no home-grown equivalent, like "hacker". But even common words are being replaced with English ones. E.g. fashion instead of modă, know-how instead of cunoștințe (knowledge), brand — marcă, however – însă (you know your language is in danger of disappearing when the conjunctions are being replaced). This is in spite of the fact that people can often hardly pronounce the English words, for example businessman is pronounced /biznismen/ (with no way to differentiate between man and men), or pronouncing "guard" as "goo-ard".

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Sure, there are loanwords that have become rooted in Romanian. But (unless one is part of a minority of people using English every day e.g. at work) a lot of those English words in Romanian are affectations of youth that disappear with age. The linguistic behavior of all my hipster friends changed radically as soon as they settled down into staid family life.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Sometimes they don't disappear with age and they become the new standard for the next generation. If age-related reversion to the old way of speaking was a universal given then we wouldn't see half the linguistic drift that we do.
- xdennis 3y ago
  I don't think they're affectations of the youth. Take the term "fake news". If journalists were in the business of informing people they would translate it ("știri false"), but they always say "fake news". You also hear experts use English terms because it makes them look more sophisticated. For example instead of saying the equivalent of "Ukrainians need to be trained to use American weapons" with all-Romanian words, you'll hear "Ukrainians need KNOW-HOW to use American weapons" with "know-how" being untranslated, even though this sentence is more awkward than the first one.

rendang 3y ago

I wonder this when I studied Russian and saw all the French/German loanwords. "Did the Russians not use to have screens/beaches/furniture before the Enlightenment?"

demetrius 3y ago
> Did the Russians not use to have screens/beaches/furniture before the Enlightenment? I don't know the evolution of the terms in question, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't! Like, what is a beach (or пляж)? It's basically берег (riverbank/seashore) but intended for recreation use. Did people of the past have enough time to recreationally use their seashores/riverbanks? I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. Same about furniture/мебель. I would assume that in the past (at least in the villages), people would often have benches, beds, tables custom-made specifically for their house, and they would not be meant to be moved out. Мебель/furniture presupposes that people produce it in one place, and then people move it to their house, and this was often not the case in the past. If your bed is made when your house is built, and cannot be moved out because bed frame goes directly into your wall, is that still furniture? Is furniture a useful word to describe that? (Not sure about screens)