Tea - The Word "tea"

The Word "tea"

The Chinese character for tea is 茶. It is pronounced differently in the various Chinese languages. Most pronounce it along the lines of cha (Mandarin has chá), but the Min varieties along the central coast of China and in Southeast Asia pronounce it like te. These two pronunciations of the Chinese word for tea have made their separate ways into other languages around the world:

• Te is from tê in the Amoy dialect, spoken in Fujian Province and Taiwan. 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.
• Cha is from the Cantonese chàh, spoken in 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 words cha come from the Mandarin chá.

The widespread form chai comes from Persian چای chay. This derives from Mandarin chá, 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.

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. Korean and Japanese, for example, retain early pronunciations of ta and da. Ta comes from the Tang Dynasty court at Chang'an: that is, from Middle Chinese. Japanese da comes from the earlier Southern Dynasties court at Nanjing, a place where the consonant was still voiced, as it is today in neighboring Shanghainese zo. Vietnamese and Zhuang have southern cha-type pronunciations.