Hamburger or Beef Patty?

Many languages borrow words from other languages. The urban areas of the United States are heavily populated with fast-food joints where Americans gather in herds during the lunch and dinner hours. Most of these "restaurants" serve hamburgers. It has always been curious to me that there is no ham in these burgers.

Although meat patties can be traced back to the eleventh century as noted in the chronology, History of Hamburgers, it wasn't until the late eighteenth century that the term "Hamburg Steak" would make it's debut. That's right, sailors travelling between the ports of New York in the U.S. and Hamburg, Germany carried the term across the Atlantic that would later be known as a "hamburger".

We have mistaken the term "hamburger" as a compound word formed by our English word "ham" and the assumed other, "burger", though "Hamburg" is the word of origin, and is not a food, but a place. Therefore, the term "cheeseburger" is actually misleading in the sense that what we term "burger" is actually a "patty".

Nevertheless, language has many functions and the colloquial use of "burger," though a transformation from the borrowed "Hamburg Steak,"  is now an accepted universal term  for a beef patty in the U.S. Now when I think of the word "hamburger," rather than be bewildered by a seemingly unfitting word, I can think of a creative meshing of language and culture.