Tea at Kakuzo.Com

The word tea

This article is about the word tea.

The word tea

The Chinese character for tea is ?, but it is pronounced differently in the various Chinese dialects. Two pronunciations have made their way into other languages around the world. One is 'te' (POJ: tê) which comes from the Minnan dialect spoken around the port of Amoy. The other is 'cha', used by the Cantonese dialect spoken around the ports of Canton and Hong Kong, as well as in the Mandarin dialect of northern China.

Languages that have Te derivatives include Armenian, Danish, Dutch, English ('tea'), Finnish, Estonian ('Tee'), French, German ('Tee'), Hebrew ('??', /te/ or /tei/), Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish (herbata from Latin herba the), Singhalese, Spanish, Swedish ('te'), Tamil, Yiddish, and scientific Latin.

Those that use Cha derivatives include Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hindi, Japanese ('?', '??', 'cha'), Korean, Nepali, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Swahili, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

It is tempting to correlate these names with the route that was used to deliver tea to these cultures, but this correspondence does not follow. For example, most British trade went through Canton, which uses cha.

In Ireland, or at least in Dublin, the term "cha" is sometimes used for tea, and "char" was a common slang term for tea throughout British Empire and Commonwealth military forces in the 19th and 20th centuries, crossing over into civilian usage. In North America, the word "chai" is used to refer almost exclusively to the Indian "chai" (or "masala chai") beverage.

Perhaps the only place in which a word unrelated to tea is used to describe the beverage is South America (particularly Andean countries), because a similar stimulant beverage, hierba mate, was consumed there long before tea arrived. In most of South America, any tea is referred to as mate.

The word tea

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Tea, a refreshing and enervating drink - Kakuzo.Com is the Home of The Book of Tea

Tea Blog