{"id":2726,"date":"2022-10-24T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/troubadourworks.com\/tiandi\/meotw\/?p=2726"},"modified":"2023-07-05T00:22:56","modified_gmt":"2023-07-05T07:22:56","slug":"cha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/troubadourworks.com\/tiandi\/meotw\/2022\/10\/24\/cha\/","title":{"rendered":"ch\u00e1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\t\t\tch\u00e1<\/span>\n(tea<\/span>\n\u8336)<\/span>\n\n \u2190 Tap\/click to show\/hide the \u201cflashcard\u201d<\/span><\/h3>\n\n

Long before drinking tea became a big part of English culture, it had been a big part of Chinese culture. As Wikipedia<\/a> summarizes:<\/p>\n

\nAn early credible record of tea drinking dates to the third century AD, in a medical text written by Chinese physician Hua Tuo.[source]<\/a><\/sup> It was popularised as a recreational drink during the Chinese Tang dynasty [(618\u2013907 CE)], and tea drinking subsequently spread to other East Asian countries. Portuguese priests and merchants introduced it to Europe during the 16th century.[source]<\/a><\/sup> During the 17th century, drinking tea became fashionable among the English, who started to plant tea on a large scale in British India.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Similarly, the English word \u201ctea\u201d and its doublet<\/a> \u201cchai\u201d originally came from the words for \u201ctea\u201d in different Chinese languages. This week\u2019s MEotW, \u201cch\u00e1<\/i><\/span>\n(tea<\/span>\n\u8336)<\/span>\u201d, is the word for \u201ctea\u201d in Mandarin.<\/p>\n

\u201cTea\u201d and its Doublet<\/h4>\n

Hold on, you may say, what\u2019s a doublet? Here is a definition<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\ndoublet<\/strong>

\nOne of two (or more) words in a language that have the same etymological root but have come to the modern language through different routes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, how did \u201ctea\u201d and its doublet \u201cchai\u201d both end up in the English language after having come from the same root through different routes?<\/p>\n

Linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne discussed<\/a> this on their podcast Lingthusiasm<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nLauren:<\/strong> One of the things I always find interesting about these loanwords that come to us in batches from particular domains is how it highlights global history, and usually global histories of trade and different power dynamics that have operated over that history. One of my absolute favourite stories is the story of tea. We\u2019ve already talked about \u201cchai\u201d and \u201cchia\u201d in Nepali, \u201ctea\u201d in English. The words for \u201ctea\u201d in many of the world\u2019s languages appear to be related. They\u2019ll either have some kind of \/te\/ or \/ti\/ pronunciation or some kind of \/t\u0361\u0283\/ \u2013 \u201cchia,\u201d \u201cchai\u201d pronunciation. That\u2019s because there were two main places in China from which tea travelled to all the different markets in the world.<\/p>\n

Gretchen:<\/strong> In Mandarin, which is historically more spoken towards the centre of China, the word for tea is \u201ccha,\u201d but in Min Nan, which is also a variety of Chinese as spoken in the coastal province of Fujian, it\u2019s pronounced \/te\/. They use the same character, but they\u2019re pronounced differently, which is very common for how Chinese gets written. The key thing here is \u201ccoastal\u201d because people who encountered the plant and the drink tea via the sea, via Fujianese traders, learned to pronounce it \/te\/ or variants on \/te\/. In French and German, it\u2019s \/te\/. In English, it used to be \/te\/ until the vowel shifted. Whereas people who encountered tea through Central China, through land routes like the silk road \u2013 so through Sinitic \u201ccha\u201d \u2013 you get Mandarin \u201ccha,\u201d Korean \u201ccha,\u201d Japanese \u201cocha,\u201d but also Hindi \u201cchai,\u201d Persian \u201cchai,\u201d Arabic \u201cshai,\u201d Turkish \u201cchai,\u201d Russian \u201cchai,\u201d and you\u2019re down to Swahili \u201cchai,\u201d all goes through that land route, and sometimes via Persia, to get from \u201ccha\u201d to \u201cchai.\u201d The great maps that people have produced where you can tell if people encountered tea through the land route where they get \u201ccha,\u201d which becomes \u201cchai,\u201d or through the sea route, which becomes \u201cte\u201d and variants on \u201cte\u201d like \u201ctea.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Development of Modern Mandarin<\/h4>\n

The mention above of historical Mandarin reminds me of a book that I read a while ago, A Billion Voices: China\u2019s Search for a Common Language<\/a>, by David Moser<\/a>. Here is an excerpt:<\/p>\n

\nAfter the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, an urgent priority for the new Chinese government was the task of establishing a common language for a linguistically fractured China. When Mao took power in 1949, language unification continued to be of vital importance to the nation building agenda. Faced with the challenge of unifying a vast country populated with hundreds of ethnicities, languages, and dialects, these political leaders were confronted with some of the same linguistic problems and conundrums raised above: Is there such a thing as \u2018the<\/em> Chinese language\u2019? Should the Chinese people share a common tongue? How should it be defined? How should pronunciation, vocabulary, and correct usage be determined? Should one standard language replace the numerous other regional variations, or should all other forms of Chinese continue to flourish? Should written Chinese continue to use the centuries-old character system, or should it be replaced with an alphabet, or some other phonetic system? And who, after all, is the final arbiter for such decisions?<\/p>\n

In the PRC, the twentieth century quest for a solution to these problems has resulted in a version of Chinese called Putonghua. How did China arrive at this common language?<\/p>\n

In what follows, I will present a brief historical overview of that process, and trace the trajectory of Putonghua as it moved into the twenty-first century.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Cantonese Connection<\/h4>\n

Getting back to how historical words for \u201ctea\u201d in different Chinese languages ended up leading to the words \u201ctea\u201d and \u201cchai\u201d in English, here is some other information<\/a>, that I found on the World Atlas of Language Structures<\/a> website:<\/p>\n

\nMost words for \u2018tea\u2019 found in the world\u2019s languages are ultimately of Chinese origin, but they differ significantly in their form due to their coming via different routes. The differences begin already on Chinese soil. Most Sinitic languages have a form similar to Mandarin ch\u00e1<\/i>, but Min Nan Chinese, spoken e.g. in Fujian and Taiwan, has instead forms like te55<\/i> (Chaozhou). The Dutch traders, who were the main importers of tea into Europe, happened to have their main contacts in Amoy (Xiamen) in Fujian. This is why they adopted the word for \u2018tea\u2019 as thee<\/i>, and in this form it then spread to large parts of Europe. The influence from Amoy is also visible in many languages spoken in the former Dutch colonies, as in Malay\/Indonesian and Javanese teh<\/i>. However, the first European tea importers were not the Dutch but the Portuguese, in the 16th century; their trade route went via Macao rather than via Amoy, and consequently Portuguese uses ch\u00e1<\/i>, derived from Cantonese cha<\/i>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus, as in other aspects, it seems that the first contact between the West and China when it comes to tea involved the Cantonese.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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