In teaching an ESL lesson about groceries yesterday, I learned the following about bread: several decades ago in Russia or Ukraine, bread was not already sliced when you bought it at the store. If you wanted a piece, you bit it off of the loaf. In Vietnamese, bánh mì [ʔɓan˦˥ mɪj˨˩] (literally snack-wheat = wheat snack) refers to long French-style baguettes, whereas our typical sliced loaves are called xăng-(đ)uých [saŋ˧˧ (ɗ)wɨt˧˥] (from 'sandwich'). (The IPA forms are Saigon pronunciation.) This reminds me of Mandarin Chinese, where 面包 miànbāo (literally flour-package) is for bread in general, whereas 土司 tǔsī (from 'toast') is for sliced bread, especially thick-sliced bread. It shows that different cultures have their own concepts of a food based on size, shape, ingredients, and use, and when a new foreign version is introduced, they are likely to borrow the foreign word for the foreign version.
