{"id":95586,"date":"2019-11-24T16:34:14","date_gmt":"2019-11-24T23:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=95586"},"modified":"2019-11-24T16:35:35","modified_gmt":"2019-11-24T23:35:35","slug":"tea-if-by-sea-cha-if-by-land-why-the-world-has-only-two-words-for-tea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/11\/24\/tea-if-by-sea-cha-if-by-land-why-the-world-has-only-two-words-for-tea\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cTea\u201d if by sea, \u201cCha\u201d if by land: Why the world has only two words for tea"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nikhil Sonnad\/The Quartz Courtesy NewsIn.Asia<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say tea\u201d in the world. One is like the English term\u2014t\u00e9<\/em> in Spanish and tee<\/em> in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha<\/em>, like chay<\/em> in Hindi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before globalization\u201d was a term anybody used. The words that sound like cha\u201d spread across the land, along the Silk Road. The tea\u201d-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term cha (\u8336) is Sinitic,\u201d meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. It began in China and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming chay\u201d (\u0686\u0627\u06cc) in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a recent discovery, 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 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Tea if by sea and Cha if by land<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But that doesn\u2019t account for tea.\u201d The Chinese character for tea, \u8336, is pronounced differently by different varieties of Chinese, though it is written the same in them all. In today\u2019s Mandarin, it is ch\u00e1. But in the Min Nan variety of Chinese, spoken in the coastal province of Fujian, the character is pronounced te. The keyword here is coastal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 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 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\u2019s expansive tea importation into Europe gave us the French th\u00e9, the German Tee, and the English tea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor belongs to the Portuguese, who are responsible for the island of Taiwan\u2019s colonial European name, Formosa. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where ch\u00e1 is used. That\u2019s why, on the map above, Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few languages have their own way of talking about tea. These languages are generally in places where tea grows naturally, which led locals to develop their own way to refer to it. In Burmese, for example, tea leaves are lakphak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The map demonstrates two different eras of globalization in action: the millennia-old overland spread of goods and ideas westward from ancient China and the 400-year-old influence of Asian culture on the seafaring Europeans of the age of exploration. Also, you just learned a new word in nearly every language on the planet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Nikhil Sonnad\/The Quartz Courtesy NewsIn.Asia With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say tea\u201d in the world. One is like the English term\u2014t\u00e9 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}