History of the word “tea”: How the word “tea” spread over land and sea– Quartz

With a couple of minor exceptions, there are truly only two methods to state “tea” worldwide. One resembles the English term– té in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are 2 examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi.

Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world provides a clear photo of how globalization worked prior to “globalization” was a term anyone utilized. 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 unique leaves back to Europe.

The term cha (? )is”Sinitic,”suggesting it prevails to many ranges of Chinese. It began in China and made its method through central Asia, ultimately ending up being “chay” (???) in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade paths of the Silk Roadway, along which, inning accordance with a current discovery, tea was traded over 2,000 years back. This kind spread beyond Persia, ending up being chay in Urdu, shay in Arabic, and chay in Russian, amongst 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 upon the Chinese cha, though those languages most likely adopted the word even before its westward spread out into Persian.

That doesn’t account for “tea.” The Chinese character for tea, ?, is noticable in a different way by various ranges of Chinese, though it is written the exact same in them all. In today’s Mandarin, it is chá. In the Min Nan range of Chinese, spoken in the seaside province of Fujian, the character is pronounced te. The keyword here is “coastal.”

The te kind used in coastal-Chinese languages infected Europe through the Dutch, who ended up being the main traders of tea in between Europe and Asia in the 17th century, as explained on the planet Atlas of Language Structures. The main Dutch ports in east Asiawere in Fujian and Taiwan, both locations where individuals used the te pronunciation. The Dutch East India Company’s extensive tea importation into Europe gave us the French thé, the German tee, and the English tea.

Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor comes from the Portuguese, who are accountable for the island of Taiwan’s colonial European name, Formosa. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where chá is utilized. That’s why, on the map above, Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.

A few languages have their own method of speaking about tea. These languages are typically in locations where tea grows naturally, which led residents to develop their own way to refer to it. In Burmese, for example, tea leaves are lakphak.

The map demonstrates two various eras of globalization in action: the millenia-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 simply discovered a brand-new word in nearly every language on earth.