Cornmeal not being eaten

[CantrFreak]

I have about 2000g of cornmeal in my character and it isn't being eaten.

[sanchez]

You have to cook it first.

[CantrFreak]

xD Oops. I musta mistaken cornmeal as cornbread. Meal in my mind is food so... yeah. Ooopzers.

[sanchez]

It's just been ground. Is there a bad translation someplace?

[SekoETC]

It might come from oatmeal being porridge, so one might draw the conclusion that cornmeal would also equal porridge. Corn flour would leave less room for misinterpretations.

[sanchez]

It's just never called 'corn flour' in English though. Meal is a word for coarsely ground grain. It's also a word for food. If this ambiguity has caused mistranslation, let us know. I'd frankly be happy to switch the English to 'masa' as that's another common word for cornmeal in my dialect, but I expect it wouldn't suit everyone.

[the_antisocial_hermit]

I suspect masa might not be very familiar to most. I haven't ever heard it before.

[Pilot]

Spanish masa is dough.

In Mexico is the common term for cornmeal dough (masa de maíz) which is used to make tortillas, tamales, etc.

Masa de trigo is wheat dough.

Using masa instead of cornmeal might confuse spanish language players.

[Talapus]

I have to agree with Hermit. I am familiar with maize, but have never heard of masa. The different language groups can name it however they want, so the english name should reflect what a majority of the english speaking players know it as. I am curious what people from the UK and Canada call cornmeal.

[SekoETC]

Yeah, I didn't say anything because usually when I say I have never heard some word before, it means I'm an ignorant foreigner. XD I have heard of cornmeal and know what it is, but it's not common in my country. I was just pointing out the fact that in one context meal can mean porridge. That doesn't negate the fact that it can also be coarse flour.

[Doug R.]

I was just pointing out the fact that in one context meal can mean porridge.

English, the language I love to hate.

I always took oatmeal to mean a meal of oats, not to mean oat porridge (as there is no other instance of meal meaning porridge). If the people who speak it can't even figure out what the hell's correct, how can a foreigner hope to? Speaking it is good training for scientists though, because everything in science has at least three different names.

(Although I have to say Germans, that assigning three possible genders to the word "the" depending on the context is really a gross over-complication )

[sanchez]

I wasn't making a serious suggestion we change the word cornmeal, only offering that 'corn flour' is not a substitute, and not the same thing. You could make 'meal' out of any grain, as Seko suggests. But why?

To get back on topic: resources generated by the millstone or grain grinder in Cantr are not edible raw, with the exception of polished rice.

[Chris]

I would vote to use "corn flour," even though it is nonstandard English. We have wheat flour, rye flour, and sorghum flour. Cornmeal is flour made from corn, after all. Though "cornmeal" may please editors and schoolmarms, it's not a particularly common word, so it's not like we would be doing a grave disservice to those using Cantr to improve their English.

[formerly known as hf]

Corn flour not standard English?
How else do you people make gravy?

Ah, wait. We call cornflour what US peeps call cornstarch. We also use it interchangeably for corn flour as in the flour of ground, dry corn (which is seems is called cornmeal in most places).

The -meal suffix isn't very common in English-Enlgish (as opposed to US-English) oatmeal is very uncommon. Porridge (or muesli) is just made from 'oats', not oatmeal.

However, cornmeal is the US word for flour made from grinding dried corn. I've seen it called both in the UK, but more commonly corn flour (as opposed to cornflour).

So, it seems we have the following possibilities:
Cornflour (which would confuse most English-English speaking people)
Corn flour (which might also confuse English-English speaking people, but is used in both US-Enlgish and English-English to refer to the product of ground, dried corn.)
Cornmeal (which is very uncommmon in English-English, but is the word used in US-Englush. However, it seems it may be confusing for non-native US-English speakers because of the -meal suffix)

Alternatively, we could translate Corn to Maize throughout, and call it Maize flour.
Although I cringe (as Maize is primarily a US term, and rarely used in English-English) it would do away with most of the confusion, and be more accessible for non-native English speaking (as corn is pretty commonly known as maize, or something similar sounding, in most European languages)

[sanchez]

Cornstarch, here, is a very fine corn flour, while cornmeal is very coarse. 'Corn flour' I'd expect to be somewhere in between, if we had it, but I've never used such a thing.
In any case, there's no real reason to change it. I think the problem brought up here was more to do with not all food resources being edible, even after some processing. I'd still like to make more recipes for corn, but the menus are such a mess it won't be soon.