The origin of the “tea” being the term for evening meal are pretty well attested to lie the poverty of the English lower classes who could not afford much more than a cup of tea in the evening.
I grew up using the word “tea” to refer to the evening meal in Australia (actually my parents were at pains to avoid this usage, but the rest of my dad’s family still does). My father, the only one in his family to attend university, clearly saw it as a dangerous class marker.
Interestingly my mother grew up using a chai language (Marathi) in the home but te languages (Cantonese and Fujianese) in the street. These usages of course were all for the drink.
(And btw your comment was funny to me because on of the all time greatest linguists of English was a Dane, Otto Jesperson).
Upon moving to the central belt, and ingratiating myself into more middle class circles of friends I then discovered:
Breakfast - eaten usually when you get up in the morning, say early morning until ~1030am
Lunch - eaten from 12pm until ~2:30pm
Afternoon Tea - taken from around 3:30pm until 4:30pm (cakes/biscuits [cookies] and would also include some kind of sandwich - often cut into triangles)
Tea - 5pm until 6pm - usually a lighter two course meal (say an omlette) and some pudding (desert).
Dinner - taken from 7pm until perhaps 9pm - this would be a fully laiden two or three course meal.
Supper - taken from around 10pm until around 11pm (or just before bedtime) - likely cheese on toast or crackers & cheese and a cuppa.
Obviously you don't need to have every one of these meals every day of the week.
And there can be other terms of course. In Guadalajara, México, where I live, schools say "hora del lonche" (lunch time) to the midday meal.
Edit: He also says 'cena' is a more formal, less common way to refer to dinner.
Google translate translates lunch first as almuerzo and second as comida if you try it.
And sometimes if you're really lucky you'll meet a Southerner who'll freak out about it, "Ha! You said 'dinner' but you meant 'lunch'!! Ha! Ha! When do you eat your lunch?! Ha Ha!!"
I had an old boss that did this regularly. The dick.
If you have the main meal in the middle of the day then it is called "dinner". The snack you have at the end of the afternoon is "tea".
If you have the main meal at the end of the afternoon it is "dinner". The snack you eat in the middle of the day is "lunch".
The difference probably depends on if you go home for a meal at mid-day or not. The later is probably more traditional as people used to work or study much closer to home. And there was somebody around during the day to prepare a meal. But nowadays going home for a main meal in the middle of the day is unusual so we all just have a small snack.
On the other hand, the after-work evening meal is usually less heavy, and is rendered as "supper" in English. And, again, I find that Americans usually assume that it takes place much later than it normally does, and is also much lighter than it normally is (basically a snack rather than a proper meal), if I use that word.
So clearly there is some implicit time-of-day mapping there.
I was always told that dinner (from "dine") is the main meal of the day. So if you have a 'fancy' afternoon meal that can be your dinner (e.g. we usually do Christmas dinner between 3 and 4).
I wonder if HN knows of a linguistic map for meal names, it appears that these words shift meaning a lot.
EDIT: I thought this was interesting -- "Harvard's Dialect Survey had the question, 'What is the distinction between dinner and supper?' Here's the geographic distribution of their results from 10,661 American respondents" https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22446/lunch-vs-d...
"Christmas lunch is what most of our readers would eat, not Christmas dinner. Use the latter only if referring specifically to an evening meal."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/about-us/style-book/143530...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Christmas+lunc...
Also this:
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?q=Christmas%20lun...
In spanish you have 3 distinct meals, 'desayuno' 'almuerzo' and 'cena' mapping strictly to a moment of the day, more or less 'breakfast' 'lunch' and 'dinner', with the option of a merienda (roughly 'tea' but usually just sweet food like cookies or some such) between lunch and dinner. Each of this happens on a specific moment of the day (morning, noon, the optional afternoon thing and well into nighttime).
Are there other languages/dialects where the word maps the importance of the meal instead of the actual time it is consumed?
One other great British-English question is "what do you call an individually portioned baked bread article" ... roll, barm, bap, cob, ...
At some point dinner transitioned to lunch and teatime to dinner for us.
Dinner is definitely most common near me but I wouldn’t blink if someone asked me over for supper or said it’s supper time.
The three meals are "Breakfast", "Lunch" and "Supper". And if Lunch or Supper is the biggest/most formal meal of the day it may be called "Dinner" instead. Hence family "Christmas Dinner" may be at lunch time, but your "Dinner party" is in the evening.
1. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/supper 2. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dinner
Interesting side note, Sup (verb) the root word for supper has been in the (old) English language since before 900 AD.
Outside of farming people have their main meal (dinner) when they come home from their office in the evening. So the lighter meal in the afternoon becomes lunch and theres no tea.
BTW, Cantonese is actually a "chai language": the character 茶 (tea) reads like "char" as in charcoal, without the h sound and in a low tone.
I knew there was a heavy class difference here, but apparently there's also substantial regional difference even within the British Isles.
Now I'm really curious, because breakfast/dinner/supper is what I was taught in school, English being my second language. And I also very quickly found that it doesn't match common usage in any of the countries I've been too... but I thought that it's because of an attempt to better reflect the times of the meals in translation that backfired. Now it sounds like they were basically just teaching us English circa first third of the 20th century?
The shift over time from breakfast, dinner, and supper to breakfast, lunch, and dinner primarily reflects changing socioeconomic realities rather than some fundamental lexical shift.
Was your elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse? Did most people go home for the mid-day meal? Was school in session through the summer and winter with breaks for the planting season and the harvest? Did most people stop going after 6th, 7th, or 8th grade? If not, then I feel like your post may be non-responsive to mine.
Yep, that looks like a serious mistake. My impression is that 'tea' or 'high tea' describes an all-class, or primarily lower class, nighttime meal. "Afternoon tea" describes the ~4 PM snack with sweet pastries instead of a primary meal.
A bit of investigation says that our mutual impression is correct, but complicated by Scotland, where "high tea" may be served with the size and timing of "afternoon tea" but with heavier, savory dishes on offer.
https://www.thespruce.com/afternon-vs-high-tea-difference-43...
In fact, though I also use three languages, the only one she and I have in common is English. Though I learnt some Marathi as a kid it was just how to read and how to talk about family relations (so limited in the European languages!) and food. We were in a part of Australia that hadn't yet heard that the White Australia laws had been abolished so speaking anything but English, even in your own home, was Very Bad, and emphasized your wog status.
I run into Mumbaikars and Punekars all the time here in the bay area but most are Hindi speakers.
Most Maharashtrians I know from the previous generation (including my parents) are from Maharashtra, and Maharashtrians have somewhat of a reputation for not wanting to leave Maharashtra.
Now it's become just another huge city IMHO.
"What are you having for tea?"
"Oh, err... just milk thanks"
Wiktionary says: dîner, From Old French disner, from Vulgar Latin *disiūnāre, from disieiūnāre, disjejūnāre (“to break the fast”)
Frankie Boyle
When I acutally went and lived in London, I learned that it was a northern thing. Which is odd, because in other ways Australia seems to be dominated by London culture. Or at least Australians talk like Londoners.
Asking someone during the morning if they had their coffee, means if they had taken the breakfast.
My understanding was that this usage referred to a meal eaten in the evening, i.e. not lunch. Your link seems to confirm that.
My grandmother used to serve tea for the evening meal when there were no guests other than her little grandson. But that's the only Danish example I personally know of. Don't know why, tea is not a bad drink for a meal.
The large meal taken in the middle of the day was "middagsmad", or "midday food" (still is in the older generations, especially rurally, in Denmark), while "middag" is generally the larger, evening meal today (so, same deal as "dinner" in English).
In South Wales they talk about "cooked dinner" which is a roasted meat meal, usually chicken for Sunday lunch, but can be any time of the week. Presumably that harks back to families having lots of uncooked meals (through poverty).
That said I used to confuse some very northern friends by talking about dinner as my evening meal. They literally only thought of dinner as lunch and the evening meal was only called tea.
I think the roots were from when only the father of the house had a cooked evening meal, and everyone else had tea and sandwiches or similar. But that was distant past I believe.
I am not sure this is universal for Australia and may also not be the case now.
I'm fairly certain my neices and nephews (mostly teenagers now), no longer call the evening meal tea.