Phrases customarily mispronounced - "want to" etc.

[Mark44]

Two different words divergently evolving with only 70 years of separation.

I don't think it's just 70 years of separation. The main language dialect on Taiwan is Taiwanese Hokkien, which is different from Mandarin.

I lived with a family long ago where the wife was of Chinese origin (she was born here in the US). Her parents and grandparents spoke a dialect called Toisan, which I believe is a dialect of Cantonese. In that dialect, chopsticks were called "fai jee" but in Mandarin, they're called "kwaitse" - at least to my ear.

 

[sysprog]

In Mandarin, the word for donut is different in Taiwan vs. China.

甜甜圈 - Taiwan - tián tián quān - sweet-sweet ring (or very sweet ring)

圈饼 - China - quān bǐng - ring cake

Two different words divergently evolving with only 70 years of separation. That's how fast languages can diverge!

They're two different categories of pastries $-$ the second term refers to traditional wedding or courtship cakes. Also, Taiwan has a strong heritage from the Guangdong (Canton) region, which has for a time much longer than 70 years been culturally and linguistically more or less divergent from other parts of China. The Cantonese wedding cakes tradition dates back at least as far as the Three Kingdoms period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marry_girl_cake

 

[Ivan Seeking]

About the time I was 30 years old, it suddenly struck me that my mother's side of the family would say things like, "Take the chicken out of the freezer to dethaw it." If they wanted something thawed, they and I would say we want it dethawed. I had heard it my entire life and for the first time it struck me that to dethaw something would logically mean to freeze it!

I happened to be talking with another moderator here back around 2003, Monique, who mentioned that this sounds like be-thaw, which would mean "to thaw" as a logical extension of German. And my mother was German and came from a town settled by German people. So it makes sense that the original be-thaw, loosely translated from German, evolved into dethaw, and stuck.