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  • Why the world only has 2 words for tea

    From Dario Niedermann@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jan 14 01:56:15 2018
    As seen on: <https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/01/13/0237216/why-the-world-only-has-two-words-for-tea>
    __________
    With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say "tea"
    in the world. One is like the English term -- te in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like
    chay in Hindi. Both versions come from China. How they spread around
    the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before "globalization" was a term anybody used.

    The words that sound like "cha" spread across land, along the Silk
    Road. The "tea"-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders
    bringing the novel leaves back to Europe. The term cha is "Sinitic,"
    meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. It began in China
    and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming "chay" in
    Persian.

    That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a recent discovery[1], tea was traded over 2,000 years
    ago. This form spread beyond Persia, becoming chay in Urdu, shay in
    Arabic, and chay in Russian, among others. It even it made its way to sub-Saharan Africa, where it became chai in Swahili. The Japanese and
    Korean terms for tea are also based on the Chinese cha, though those
    languages likely adopted the word even before its westward spread into
    Persian.

    But that doesn't account for "tea." The te form used in coastal-Chinese languages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the primary traders
    of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th century, as explained[2] in
    the World Atlas of Language Structures. The main Dutch ports in east
    Asia were in Fujian and Taiwan, both places where people used the te pronunciation. The Dutch East India Company's expansive tea importation
    into Europe gave us the French the, the German Tee, and the English tea.

    __________
    [1] <https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/28/silk-road-even-older-than-thought-ancient-tea-suggests>

    [2] <http://wals.info/chapter/138>


    --
    Dario Niedermann. Also on the Internet at:

    gopher://darioniedermann.it/ <> https://www.darioniedermann.it/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Scott Dorsey@21:1/5 to dario@darioniedermann.it on Sat Jan 20 12:52:04 2018
    Dario Niedermann <dario@darioniedermann.it> wrote:
    With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say "tea"
    in the world. One is like the English term -- te in Spanish and tee in >Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like
    chay in Hindi. Both versions come from China. How they spread around
    the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before >"globalization" was a term anybody used.

    This theory is an interesting one, but perhaps it is more fundamental than that. There are many nearly universal words. Nearly every language has
    some derivation of "mama" or "mother" to describe one's parent. It is not learned, it is some of the very limited innate language that the brain comes with.

    "Tea" and "Chai" are also like this, they are words that come in the brain
    at birth because the brain itself is designed to subsist on tea. Tea is nature's most perfect beverage: it is cooling in hot weather and warming in cold. It wakes you up in the morning and puts you to sleep at night. The human being and the tea plant co-evolved and neither one can survive independently.

    In comparison with the so-called "coffee," itself merely a repulsive sort
    of burned bean soup, tea is fundamentally integral to the process of human life. So it is no wonder that the mind is born with an innate need for
    tea and consequently for the vocabulary to request it. "Chai, Chai!"
    cries the child. "Forget my mother's milk, I want Fujian oolong!" That
    is how we get our words for tea in all languages.
    --scott


    --
    "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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