Etymology of the term tea

Tea bowls from the Belitung shipwreck (Tang period) , dated 826. Lower left bowl with lettering cha zhan zi, 'tea bowl' using the old character “荼 - tú” for tea.

The etymology of the term tea can be traced back to the different pronunciations of the word in the Chinese language . Almost all terms used worldwide for tea belong to three large groups of words: Te , cha and chai reflect the history of the spread of tea culture and the tea trade from China across the globe. In the rare cases in which different names for tea are used by these groups, the terms are mostly derived from the languages ​​of ethnic minorities from the regions of origin of the tea plant, from which the Chinese terms ultimately developed.

pronunciation

Spelling of the Chinese character 茶 - chá .

The Chinese character for tea is “ 茶 ”, originally with an additional horizontal line as “ 荼 ” (pronounced do 'bitter plant'). The character was given its present form at the time of the Tang Dynasty by Lu Yu in his classic work Chajing (Book of Tea).

The word is pronounced differently in the different variants of the Chinese language: chá in Mandarin , zo and dzo in Wu , and ta or te in Min . Lee (2008) assumes that the different pronunciations come from the different terms for tea in ancient China. For example, tu (荼) could have come from tê ; Phonology researchers, on the other hand, put forward the theory that cha , te and dzo come from the same root - with the reconstructed hypothetical pronunciation dra ( dr stands for a single consonant for the retroflex d ). This has changed over time due to sound shifts . Other old terms for tea are jia ( 檟 , 'bitter tu ' in the Hanzeit ), she ( 蔎 ), ming ( 茗 , 'fine, particularly tender tea') and chuan ( 荈 ), where ming is the only word for tea in Use remained. In most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese , the word is pronounced like cha , and various forms of Hokkien on the Chinese south coast and in Southeast Asia pronounce it like teh . These two pronunciation variants have found their way into other languages ​​of the world in different ways:

• Te is derived from the Amoy dialect ( tê ) of the southern Fujian province . The port cities of Xiamen (Amoy) and Quanzhou used to be trading centers for Western European traders such as the Dutch. They could have got to know the word directly in Fujian, at their trading post in Taiwan , or indirectly from Malay traders in Banten province in western Java . From Dutch the term then spread to other Western European languages, including French thé , Spanish té and German tea . According to the German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm , the word was taken over from the Dutch thee into German in the 17th century .

• Cha is derived from the Cantonese word chàh , the language of the province of Guangzhou (Canton) and the port cities of Hong Kong and Macau . Western traders, especially the Portuguese, were able to get to know the term at these important trading centers and spread it to India as early as the 16th century. The pronunciation of cha in Korean and Japanese found its way into the respective languages ​​at an earlier time due to geographical proximity through trade contacts and cultural exchange.

• Chai , the third form, probably originated from the Persian چای chay . Both forms, châ and chây , can be found in Persian dictionaries. These could come from the northern Chinese spelling chá , which had reached Central Asia and on to Persia by land via the Silk Road and received the Persian suffix -yi there , before it was then adopted into Arabic, Turkish, Russian and other languages. The pronunciation chai came to India via the Mughal Empire , and into English via the Urdu language. In the English language all three forms are known: cha or char (both pronounced 'tʃɑː ) detectable since the late 16th century; tea , since the 17th century; and finally chai in the 20th century .

Sino-Xenian languages, i.e. those that integrated central Chinese loanwords into their vocabulary, such as Vietnamese, Zhuang, Tibetan, Korean and Japanese, adopted their terms for tea earlier and from other Chinese language forms. Although it normally uses the pronunciation cha , the pronunciation variants ta and da are still known in the Japanese language but are no longer used. Korean also has ta in addition to cha , and Vietnamese trà in addition to chè . The Japanese pronunciation variants come from different times at which the terms found their way into linguistic usage: Ta comes from the Tang farm in Chang'an , that is, from Central Chinese; there comes from the usage of the Southern Dynasty in Nanjing , where the consonant was still voiced as zo . Vietnamese and Zhuang pronounce cha in the South Chinese way.

The few exceptions in which the terms for tea do not come from the three major groups te , cha and chai come from regional languages ​​of the regions of origin of the tea plant . Examples are la (imported tea) and miiem (wild tea collected in the mountains) from the language of the Wa peoples in northeast Burma and southwestern Yunnan and lahpet (a dish made from fermented or pickled tea leaves) in Burmese . Austro-Asian languages know the terms meng (fermented tea leaves) in Lamet , miang (fermented tea) in Thai as well as the languages ​​of the Tibetan Burman and Tai language families that are spoken in Southeast Asia and Southwest China. The Chinese terms tu , cha and ming could also have come from Austro-Asian languages. Cha could, for example, have arisen from the archaic Austro-Asian root la ("leaf"), which is derived from ancient southwest Chinese languages. Sinitic, Tibeto-Burmese and Tai speakers who came into contact with the Austro-Asian speakers borrowed their terms for tea there.

Derivatives of te

language	word	language	word	language	word	language	word	language	word
Afrikaans	tea	Western Armenian	թեյ [tʰɛj]	Basque	tea	Belarusian	гарба́та ( garbáta ) (1)	Català	te
Kashubian	(h) arbata (1)	Czech	té or thé (2)	Danish	te	Dutch	thee	English	tea
Esperanto	teo	Estonian	tea	Faroese	te	Finnish	tea	French	thé
West Frisian	tea	Galician	té	German	tea	Greek	τέϊον téïon	Hebrew	תה, te
Hungarian	tea	Icelandic	te	Malay	teh	Irish	tae	Italian	tè
Javanese	tèh	Kannada	ಟೀಸೊಪ್ಪು ṭīsoppu	Khmer	តែ tae	Latin (scientific)	thea	Latvian	tēja
Leonese	té	Limburgish	tiè	Lithuanian	arbata (1)	Low German	Tea [tʰɛˑɪ] or Tei [tʰaˑɪ]	Malay	teh
Malayalam	തേയില tēyilai	Maltese	tè	Norwegian	te	Occitan	tè	Polish	herbata (1)
Scots	tea [tiː] ~ [teː]	Scottish Gaelic	tì , teatha	Sinhala	tē තේ	Spanish	té	Sundanese	entèh
Swedish	te	Tamil	தேநீர் tēnīru (3)	Telugu	తేనీరు tēnīr (4)	Ukrainian	gerbata (1)	Welsh	te

Note:

• ⁽¹⁾ from Latin herbis thea , in Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Kashubian (in the last two languages g- is pronounced as h- )
• ⁽²⁾ té or thé , is considered an archaic or literary word; čaj has been in use in the Czech language since the early 20th century .
• ⁽³⁾ nīr - 'water'; tēyilai - 'tea leaf' ( ilai - 'leaf')
• ⁽⁴⁾ nīru - 'water'; ṭīyāku - 'tea leaf' (āku - 'leaf' in Telugu )

Derivatives of cha

language	word	language	word	language	word	language	word	language	word
Chinese	茶Chá	Assamese	চাহ saw	Bengali	চা cha	Kapampangan	cha	Cebuano	tsá
English	cha or char	Gujarati	ચા chā	Japanese	茶, ち ゃ cha	Kannada	ಚಹಾ chahā	Khasi	sha
Punjabi	ਚਾਹ cha	Korean	차 cha (1)	Kurdish languages	ça	Lao	ຊາ / saː˦˥ /	Marathi	चहा chahā
Oḍiā	ଚା cha	Persian	چای chā	Portuguese	chá	Sindhi	chahen چانهه	Somali	shaah
Sylheti	ছা sa	Tagalog	tsaá	Thai	ชา / t͡ɕʰaː˧ /	Tibetan	ཇ་ yes	Vietnamese	trà and chè

Derivatives of chay

language	word	language	word	language	word	language	word	language	word
Albanian	çaj	Amharic	ሻይ shay	Arabic	شاي shāy	Assyrian-New Aramaic dialect	ܟ݈ܐܝ chai	Eastern Armenian	թեյ tey
Azerbaijani	çay	Bosnian	čaj	Bulgarian	чай chai	Chechen	чай chay	Croatian	čaj
Czech	čaj	English	chai	Finnish dialectal	tsai , tsaiju , saiju or saikka	Georgian	ჩაი chai	Greek	τσάι tsái
Hindi	चाय Chay	Kazakh	шай shai	Kyrgyz	чай chai	Kinyarwanda	icyayi	Jewish Spanish	צ'יי chai
Macedonian	чај čaj	Malayalam	ചായ chaaya	Mongolian	цай tsai	Nepali	chiyā चिया	Pashto	چای chay
Persian	چای chāī (1)	Romanian	ceai	Russian	чай chay	Serbian	чај čaj	Slovak	čaj
Slovenian	čaj	Swahili	chai	Tajik	чой choy	Tatar	çäy	Tlingit	cháayu
Turkish	çay	Turkmen	çaý	Ukrainian	чай chai	Urdu	چائے chai	Uzbek	choy

Note:

• ⁽¹⁾ derived from the older pronunciation چا - "cha".

Other

language	word	language	word	language	word
Japanese	だda , たta (1)	Korean	다 da ta (1)	Burmese	lahpet ləpʰɛʔ (2)
Thai	miang (2)	Lamet	quantity	Tai	la

Note:

• ⁽¹⁾ Meal made from fermented tea leaves
• ⁽²⁾ fermented tea

Individual evidence

1. ^ Victor H. Mair, Erling Hoh: The True History of Tea . Thames & Hudson, 2009, ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1 , pp. e-book, item 750 .
2. ^ Victor H. Mair, Erling Hoh: The True History of Tea . Thames & Hudson, 2009, ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1 , pp. 262-264 .
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Victor H. Mair, Erling Hoh: The True History of Tea . Thames & Hudson, 2009, ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1 , pp. 264-265 .
4. ^ Albert E. Dien: Six Dynasties Civilization . Yale University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-300-07404-8 , pp. 362 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
5. ^ Bret Hinsch: The ultimate guide to Chinese tea . 2011, p. 14 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
6. ↑ Nicola Salter: Hot Water for Tea: An inspired collection of tea remedies and aromatic elixirs for your mind and body, beauty and soul . Archway Publishing, 2013, ISBN 978-1-60693-247-6 , pp. 4 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
7. ↑ Peter T. Daniels (Ed.): The World's Writing Systems . Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0-19-507993-7 , pp. 203 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
8. ↑ 「茶」 的 字形 與 音韻 變遷 (提要). (No longer available online.) September 29, 2010, archived from the original on September 29, 2010 ; Retrieved August 25, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ Keekok Lee: Warp and Weft, Chinese Language and Culture . Eloquent Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-60693-247-6 , pp. 97 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
10. ↑ Why we call tea "cha" and "te"? (No longer available online.) In: Hong Kong Museum of Tea Ware. Archived from the original on January 16, 2018 ; Retrieved August 25, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
11. ↑ Östen Dahl: Chapter 138: Tea. In: The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Max Planck Digital Library, accessed February 21, 2018 . 
12. ↑ Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado, Anthony Xavier Soares: Portuguese Vocables in Asiatic Languages: From the Portuguese Original of Monsignor Sebastiao Rodolfo Dalgado, Volume 1 . South Asia Books, 1988, ISBN 978-81-206-0413-1 , pp. 94–95 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
13. ^ Victor H. Mair, Erling Hoh: The True History of Tea . Thames & Hudson, 2009, ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1 , pp. 263 .
14. ↑ Chai. (No longer available online.) In: American Heritage Dictionary. February 18, 2014, archived from the original on February 18, 2014 ; Retrieved on August 25, 2014 : “Chai: A beverage made from spiced black tea, honey, and milk. ETYMOLOGY: Ultimately from Chinese (Mandarin) chá “ Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
15. ↑ tea. In: Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved February 21, 2018 : “The Portuguese word (attested from 1550s) came via Macao; and Rus. chai, pers. cha, Gk. tsai, Arabic shay, and Turk. çay all came overland from the Mandarin form. " 
16. ↑ char. In: Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved February 21, 2018 . 
17. ↑ tea. In: Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Retrieved February 21, 2018 . 
18. ↑ chai. In: Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Retrieved February 21, 2018 . 
19. ^ ^{A b} Victor H. Mair, Erling Hoh: The True History of Tea . Thames & Hudson, 2009, ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1 , pp. 262 .
20. ^ Victor H. Mair, Erling Hoh: The True History of Tea . Thames & Hudson, 2009, ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1 , pp. 265-267 .