Hi Dave, good to see you back! Interesting concept, too – thanks for posting it.

It’s a potentially useful description, I think. Although I understand what’s being referred to in the suggestion that it is a subcategory of "false friend", I think in practice this is a bit of a sideshow. After all, surely the process underlying this ‘change of meaning’ is about the difference between denotation and connotation. For example, in the case of a new drink featuring an infusion of dried leaves, if your only connotative experience in the domestic culture is of ‘Indian’ tea then that is what the word will come to denote. If in the foreign culture you have a connotative experience that suggests a wide range of drinks, the word will denote a less specific meaning.

Conversely to that narrowing of denotation is what happens when our experience of potential meaning expands. By the time you have umpteen connotations of tea ranging across the whole spectrum of ‘bits of plant and fruit extracts infused with hot water’ we then do a retrofit by labelling them ‘Indian tea’, ‘herb tea’ and so on. Yeah, we even have a special word for this process… ;)