vijayjohn wrote:OldBoring wrote:No idea how bisteca came to mean pork chop in Portuguese.
It did?
Apparently it means rib eye, and is technically a cut of meat, and can be either beef, pork or lamb. But it seems that at least in Brazil it defaults to the cut of pork? At least that's what I heard from Brazilians.
Because American ones are bigger and impressed the pants off the Brits two hundred years ago.
This doesn't explain how many Romance languages got the word for steak from English.
Italian stoccafisso comes from English stockfish. Again, how come... since Britain isn't famous for stockfish either...
Because everyone who speaks an Indo-European language in Europe calls it the same thing?[/quote]
This doesn't explain how Italian (don't know about other Indo-European languages in Europe) got the word for stockfish from English.