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...
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?
Scottish git here....rolls (or maybe morning rolls if posh). But where I'm from in Scotland you'd ask for "softies" otherwise you'd get a slightly harder well-fired roll if there was a choice.
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...