Re: International Tea Day (15 December)

On 2024-12-17 12:15:22 +0000, Christian Weisgerber said:

On 2024-12-17, Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com> wrote:
 

Something that I've found curious is that although many languages
(English, French, German, Spanish etc.) use words similar to "tea",
some (Russian, Portuguese, Chinese etc.) use ones similar to "cha".
(Having said that, English has "char" as a slang word.)

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_tea
  Nearly all of the words for tea worldwide originate from Chinese
  pronunciations of the word 茶, and they fall into three broad groups:
  te, cha and chai, present in English as tea, cha or char, and chai. The
  earliest of the three to enter English is cha, which came in the 1590s
  via the Portuguese, who traded in Macao and picked up the Cantonese
  pronunciation of the word. The more common tea form arrived in the
  17th century via the Dutch, who acquired it either indirectly from the
  Malay teh, or directly from the tê pronunciation in Min Chinese. The
  third form chai (meaning "spiced tea") originated from a northern
  Chinese pronunciation of cha, which travelled overland to Central Asia
  and Persia where it picked up a Persian ending yi, and entered English
  via Hindustani in the 20th century.
 I've seem a better map I can no longer find, but here's the one
from WALS:
https://wals.info/feature/138A

Thanks. Very interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that tea and cha had a common origin.
Your map is interesting, but as Chile is (or used to be) as much of a tea-drinking nation as the UK or Russia, I'm surprised there is no symbol for it. Pablo Neruda was at one time the Chilean consul in Ceylon. One day he was approached by a British colonial official who wanted to what they did with all the tea they imported from Ceylon. We drink it, he said. Incidentally, they call it té, as in peninsular Spanish.
--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 37 years; mainly in England until 1987.