What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. Itâs like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.
(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)
âChaiâ means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but âchai teaâ in English means âtea prepared like masala chaiâ because itâs useful to have a word to distinguish âthe kind of tea we make hereâ from âthe kind of tea they make somewhere elseâ.
âNaanâ may mean bread, but ânaan breadâ means specifically âbread prepared like thisâ because itâs useful to have a word to distinguish between âbread made how we make itâ and âbread how other people make itâ.
We also sometimes say âliege lordâ when talking about feudal homage, even though âliegeâ is just âlordâ in French, or âflower blossomâ to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when âflowerâ was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom.Â
We also do this with place names:Â âbreaâ means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like âthereâs tar hereâ, we took that and said âOkay, hereâs the La Brea tar pitsâ.
 Or âSaharaâ. Sahara already meant âgiant desert,â but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).
English doesnât seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.
Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says âJohn walksâ, and the -s on walks means âone person is doing thisâ even though we know âJohnâ is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when itâs abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (âayer [yo] caminĂŠ por el parque y juguĂŠ tenisâ even though âayerâ means yesterday and âyoâ means I and the -ĂŠ means âI in the pastâ). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that âchaiâ is a type of tea and ânaanâ is a type of bread and âSaharaâ is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though âpan dulceâ means âsweet breadâ.)
Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like âteaâ (like tĂŠ in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like âchaiâ (like cha in Portuguese).
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