Etymology of tea

The etymology of tea can be traced back to the various Chinese pronunciations of the word. Nearly all the words for tea worldwide, fall into three broad groups: te, cha and chai, which reflected the history of transmission of tea drinking culture and trade from China to countries around the world.^[1] The few exceptions of words for tea that don't fall into these three broad groups are mostly from the minor languages from the botanical homeland of the tea plant, and likely to be the ultimate origin of the Chinese words for tea.^[2]

Pronunciation

The Chinese character for tea is 茶, originally written with an extra horizontal stroke as 荼 (pronounced tu, used as a word for a bitter herb), and acquired its current form in the Tang Dynasty first used in the eighth-century treatise on tea The Classic of Tea.^[3][4][5] The word is pronounced differently in the different varieties of Chinese, such as chá in Mandarin, zo and dzo in Wu Chinese, and ta and te in Min Chinese.^[6][7] One suggestion is that the different pronunciations may have arisen from the different words for tea in ancient China, for example tu (荼) may have given rise to tê;^[8] historical phonologists however argued that the cha, te and dzo all arose from the same root with a reconstructed hypothetical pronunciation dra (dr- represents a single consonant for a retroflex d), which changed due to sound shift through the centuries.^[2] Other ancient words for tea include jia (檟, defined as "bitter tu" during the Han Dynasty), she (蔎), ming (茗, meaning "fine, special tender tea") and chuan (荈), with ming the only other word still in use for tea.^[9][2] Most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce it along the lines of cha, but Hokkien varieties along the Southern coast of China and in Southeast Asia pronounce it like teh. These two pronunciations have made their separate ways into other languages around the world:^[10]

• Te is from the Amoy tê of southern Fujian province. It reached the West from the port of Xiamen (Amoy), once a major point of contact with Western European traders such as the Dutch, who spread it to Western Europe. This pronunciation gives rise to English "tea" and similar words in other languages, and is the most common form worldwide
• Cha is from the Cantonese chàh of Guangzhou (Canton) and the ports of Hong Kong and Macau, also major points of contact, especially with the Portuguese, who spread it to India in the 16th century. The Korean and Japanese pronunciations of cha, however, came not from Cantonese, rather they were borrowed into Korean and Japanese during earlier periods of Chinese history.

A third form, the increasingly widespread chai is likely to have come from Persian چای chay. Both the châ and chây forms are found in Persian dictionaries.^[11] They derive from Northern Chinese pronunciation of chá,^[12] which passed overland to Central Asia and Persia, where it picked up the Persian grammatical suffix -yi before passing on to Russian, Arabic, Urdu, Turkish, etc.^[13]

English has all three forms: cha or char (both pronounced /ˈtʃɑː/), attested from the 16th century; tea, from the 17th; and chai, from the 20th.

Languages in more intense contact with Chinese, Sinospheric languages like Vietnamese, Zhuang, Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese, may have borrowed their words for tea at an earlier time and from a different variety of Chinese, so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Although normally pronounced as cha, Japanese also retains the early but now uncommon pronunciations of ta and da, similarly Korean also has ta in addition to cha, and Vietnamese trà in addition to chà.^[14] Japanese has different pronunciations for the word tea depending on when the pronunciations was first borrowed into the language: Ta comes from the Tang Dynasty court at Chang'an: that is, from Middle Chinese; da however comes from the earlier Southern Dynasties court at Nanjing, a place where the consonant was still voiced, as it is today in neighbouring Shanghainese zo. Vietnamese and Zhuang have southern cha-type pronunciations.

The few exceptions of words for tea that do not fall into the three broad groups of te, cha and chai are the minor languages from the botanical homeland of the tea plant.^[2] Examples are la (meaning tea purchase elsewhere) and miiem (wild tea gathered in the hills) from the Wa people of northeast Burma and southwest Yunnan, letpet in Burmese and meng in Lamet meaning "fermented tea leaves", as well as miang in Thai ("fermented tea"). These languages belong to the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman and Tai families of languages now found in South East Asia and southwest of China. It has been proposed that the Chinese words for tea, tu, cha and ming, may have been derived from the archaic root words of the Austro-Asiatic languages in the southwest China. Cha for example may have been derived from an archaic Austro-Asiatic root *la, meaning "leaf". The Sinitic, Tibetan-Burman and Tai speakers who came into contact with the Austro-Asiatic speakers then borrowed their word for tea.^[15]

Etymological observations

The different words for tea fall into two main groups: "te-derived" (Min) and "cha-derived" (Cantonese and Mandarin).^[13] The words that various languages use for "tea" reveal where those nations first acquired their tea and tea culture.

• Portuguese traders were the first Europeans to import the herb in large amounts. The Portuguese borrowed their word for tea (chá) from Cantonese in the 1550s via their trading posts in the south of China, especially Macau.^[16]
• In Central Asia, Mandarin cha developed into Persian chay, and this form spread with Persian trade and cultural influence.
• Russia (chai) encountered tea in Central Asia.
• The Burmese word for "tea", lahpet (MLCTS: lak hpak, pronounced: [ləpʰɛʔ]) does not fall into either of the three main groups and may have been derived from a proto Austro-Asiatic root word.
• The Dutch word for "tea" (thee) comes from Min Chinese. The Dutch may have borrowed their word for tea through trade directly from Fujian, or from Fujianese or Malay traders in Java. From 1610 on, the Dutch played a dominant role in the early European tea trade, via the Dutch East India Company, influencing other languages to use the Dutch word for tea. Other European languages whose words for tea derive from Min (via Dutch) include English, French (thé), Spanish (té), and German (Tee).^[16]
• The Dutch first introduced tea to England in 1644.^[16] By the 19th century, most British tea was purchased directly from merchants in Canton, whose population uses cha, though English never replaced its Dutch-derived Min word for tea.

At times, a te form will follow a cha form, or vice versa, giving rise to both in one language, at times one an imported variant of the other.

• In North America, the word chai is used to refer almost exclusively to the Indian masala chai (spiced tea) beverage, in contrast to tea itself.
• The inverse pattern is seen in Moroccan colloquial Arabic (Darija), shay means "generic, or black Middle Eastern tea" whereas tay refers particularly to Zhejiang or Fujian green tea with fresh mint leaves. The Moroccans are said to have acquired this taste for green tea—unique in the Arab world—after the ruler Mulay Hassan exchanged some European hostages captured by the Barbary pirates for a whole ship of Chinese tea. See Moroccan tea culture.
• The colloquial Greek word for tea is tsáï, from Slavic chai. Its formal equivalent, used in earlier centuries, is téïon, from tê.
• The Polish word for a tea-kettle is czajnik, which could be derived directly from chai or from the cognate Russian word. However, tea in Polish is herbata, which, as well as Lithuanian arbata, was derived from the Dutch herba thee, although a minority believes that it was derived Latin herba thea, meaning "tea herb."^[14]
• The normal word for tea in Finnish is tee, which is a Swedish loan. However, it is often colloquially referred to, especially in Eastern Finland and in Helsinki, as tsai, tsaiju, saiju or saikka, which is cognate to the Russian word chai. The latter word refers always to black tea, while green tea is always tee.
• In Ireland, or at least in Dublin, the term cha is sometimes used for "tea," as is pre-vowel-shift pronunciation "tay" (from which the Irish Gaelic word tae is derived). 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.
• The British slang word "char" for "tea" arose from its Cantonese Chinese pronunciation "cha" with its spelling affected by the fact that ar is a more common way of representing the phoneme /ɑː/ in British English.

Derivatives of te

Notes:

• ⁽¹⁾ from Latin herba thea, found in Polish, Western Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Kashubian (for the last two the g- is pronounced as h-)^[14]
• ⁽²⁾ té or thé, but this term is considered archaic and is a literary expression; since roughly the beginning of the 20th century, čaj is used for "tea" in Czech language, see the following table
• ⁽³⁾ neer means water; theyilai means "tea leaf" (ilai = leaf)
• ⁽⁴⁾ neeru means water; theyaaku means "tea leaf" (aaku = leaf in Telugu)

Derivatives of cha

Notes:

• ⁽¹⁾ The main pronunciations of 茶 in Korea and Japan are 차 cha and ちゃ cha, respectively. (Japanese ocha (おちゃ) is honorific.) These are connected with the pronunciations at the capitals of the Song and Ming dynasties.
• ⁽²⁾ Trà and chè are variant pronunciations of 茶; the latter is used mainly in northern Vietnam and describes a tea made with freshly picked leaves.

Derivatives of chay

Notes:

• ⁽¹⁾ Derived from the earlier pronunciation چا cha.

Others

• ⁽¹⁾ Note that cha is the common pronunciation of "tea" in Japanese and Korean.
• ⁽²⁾ Fermented tea leaves eaten as a meal
• ⁽³⁾ Fermented tea

References