Etymology of tea

The etymology of the word tea can be traced back to the various Chinese pronunciations of the Chinese word 茶. Nearly all of the words for tea worldwide, fall into three broad groups: te, cha and chai, which reflected the history of transmission of tea drinking culture and trade from China to countries around the world.[1] The few exceptions of words for tea that do not fall into these three broad groups are mostly from the minor languages from the botanical homeland of the tea plant, and likely to be the ultimate origin of the Chinese words for tea. None of these words mean 'dinner' or a late afternoon meal.[2]

Pronunciation

The Chinese character for tea is 茶, originally written with an extra horizontal stroke as 荼 (pronounced tu, used as a word for a bitter herb), and acquired its current form in the Tang Dynasty first used in the eighth-century treatise on tea The Classic of Tea.[3][4][5] The word is pronounced differently in the different varieties of Chinese, such as chá in Mandarin, zo and dzo in Wu Chinese, and ta and te in Min Chinese.[6][7] One suggestion is that the different pronunciations may have arisen from the different words for tea in ancient China, for example tu (荼) may have given rise to tê;[8] historical phonologists however argued that the cha, te and dzo all arose from the same root with a reconstructed hypothetical pronunciation dra (dr- represents a single consonant for a retroflex d), which changed due to sound shift through the centuries.[2] Other ancient words for tea include jia (檟, defined as "bitter tu" during the Han Dynasty), she (蔎), ming (茗, meaning "fine, special tender tea") and chuan (荈), with ming the only other word still in use for tea.[2][9] Most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce it along the lines of cha, but Min varieties along the Southern coast of China and in Southeast Asia pronounce it like teh. These two pronunciations have made their separate ways into other languages around the world:[10]

• Te is from the Amoy tê of southern Fujian province. The ports of Xiamen (Amoy) and Quanzhou were once major points of contact with foreign traders. Western European traders such as the Dutch may have taken this pronunciation either directly from Fujian or Formosa where they had established a port, or indirectly via Malay traders in Bantam, Java.[11] The Dutch then spread this pronunciation of tea to Western Europe. This pronunciation gives rise to English "tea" and similar words in other languages, and is the most common form worldwide.
• Cha is from the Cantonese chàh of 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 pronunciations of cha, however, came not from Cantonese, rather they were borrowed into Korean and Japanese during earlier periods of Chinese history.

A third form, chai, is likely to have come from Persian چای chay. Both the châ and chây forms are found in Persian dictionaries.[12] They are thought to have been derived from Northern Chinese pronunciation of chá,[13] which passed overland to Central Asia and Persia, where it picked up the Persian grammatical suffix -yi before passing on to Russian, Arabic, Turkish, etc.[14] The chai pronunciation was introduced into India by the Mughals, and entered English via Hindi-Urdu.[2]

English has all three forms: cha or char (both pronounced /ˈtʃɑː/), attested from the late 16th century;[15] tea, from the 17th;[16] and chai, from the 20th.[17]

Languages in more intense contact with Chinese, Sinospheric languages like Korean, and Japanese, may have borrowed their words for tea at an earlier time and from a different variety of Chinese, in the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Although normally pronounced as cha, Japanese also retains the early but now uncommon pronunciations of ta and da, similarly Korean also has ta in addition to cha, and Vietnamese trà in addition to chè.[18] The different pronunciations for tea in Japanese arose from the different times the pronunciations were borrowed into the language: Ta comes from the Tang Dynasty court at Chang'an: that is, from Middle Chinese; da however comes from the earlier Southern Dynasties court at Nanjing, a place where the consonant was still voiced, as it is today in neighbouring Shanghainese zo. Zhuang has southern cha-type pronunciations.

The few exceptions of words for tea that do not fall into the three broad groups of te, cha and chai are the minor languages from the botanical homeland of the tea plant.[2] Examples are la (meaning tea purchased elsewhere) and miiem (wild tea gathered in the hills) from the Wa people of northeast Burma and southwest Yunnan, letpet in Burmese and meng in Lamet meaning "fermented tea leaves", as well as miang in Thai ("fermented tea"). These languages belong to the Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Tai families of languages now found in South East Asia and southwest of China. Scholars have suggested that the Austro-Asiatic languages may be the ultimate source of the word tea, including the various Chinese words for tea such as tu, cha and ming. Cha for example may have been derived from an archaic Austro-Asiatic root word *la (Proto-Austroasiatic: *slaʔ, cognate with Proto-Vietic *s-laːʔ), meaning "leaf", used by an ancient people from southwest China, while ming may be from the Mon–Khmer meng (fermented tea leaves). The Sinitic, Tibeto-Burman and Tai speakers who came into contact with the Austro-Asiatic speakers then borrowed their words for tea.[19]

Etymological observations

The different words for tea fall into two main groups: "te-derived" (Min) and "cha-derived" (Cantonese and Mandarin).[14] The words that various languages use for "tea" reveal where those nations first acquired their tea and tea culture.

• Portuguese traders were the first Europeans to import the herb in large amounts. The Portuguese borrowed their word for tea (chá) from Cantonese in the 1550s via their trading posts in the south of China, especially Macau.[20]
• In Central Asia, Mandarin cha developed into Persian chay, and this form spread with Central Asian trade and cultural influence.
• Russia (chai) encountered tea in Central Asia.
• The Dutch word for "tea" (thee) comes from Min Chinese. The Dutch may have borrowed their word for tea through trade directly from Fujian or Formosa, or from Malay traders in Java who had adopted the Min pronunciation as teh.[11][20] The Dutch first imported tea around 1606 from Macao via Bantam, Java,[21] and played a dominant role in the early European tea trade through the Dutch East India Company, influencing other European languages, including English, French (thé), Spanish (té), and German (Tee).[20]
• The Dutch first introduced tea to England in 1644.[20] By the 19th century, most British tea was purchased directly from merchants in Canton, whose population uses cha, the English however kept its Dutch-derived Min word for tea, although char is sometimes used colloquially to refer to the drink in British English (see below).

At times, a te form will follow a cha form, or vice versa, giving rise to both in one language, at times one an imported variant of the other.

• In North America, the word chai is used to refer almost exclusively to the Indian masala chai (spiced tea) beverage, in contrast to tea itself.
• The inverse pattern is seen in Moroccan colloquial Arabic (Darija), shay means "generic, or black Middle Eastern tea" whereas tay refers particularly to Zhejiang or Fujian green tea with fresh mint leaves. The Moroccans are said to have acquired this taste for green tea—unique in the Arab world—after the ruler Mulay Hassan exchanged some European hostages captured by the Barbary pirates for a whole ship of Chinese tea. See Moroccan tea culture.
• The colloquial Greek word for tea is tsáï, from Slavic chai. Its formal equivalent, used in earlier centuries, is téïon, from tê.
• The Polish word for a tea-kettle is czajnik, which could be derived directly from chai or from the cognate Russian word. However, tea in Polish is herbata, which, as well as Lithuanian arbata, was derived from the Dutch herba thee, although a minority believes that it was derived Latin herba thea, meaning "tea herb."[18]
• The normal word for tea in Finnish is tee, which is a Swedish loan. However, it is often colloquially referred to, especially in Eastern Finland and in Helsinki, as tsai, tsaiju, saiju or saikka, which is cognate to the Russian word chai. The latter word refers always to black tea, while green tea is always tee.
• In Ireland, or at least in Dublin, the term cha is sometimes used for "tea," as is pre-vowel-shift pronunciation "tay" (from which the Irish Gaelic word tae is derived). Char was a common slang term for tea throughout British Empire and Commonwealth military forces in the 19th and 20th centuries, crossing over into civilian usage.
• The British slang word "char" for "tea" arose from its Cantonese Chinese pronunciation "cha" with its spelling affected by the fact that ar is a more common way of representing the phoneme /ɑː/ in British English.

Derivatives of te

Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name
Afrikaans	tee	Armenian	թեյ [tʰɛj]	Basque	tea	Belarusian	гарба́та (harbáta)(1)	Catalan	te
Cassubian	(h)arbata(1)	Czech	té or thé(2)	Danish	te	Dutch	thee	English	tea
Esperanto	teo	Estonian	tee	Faroese	te	Finnish	tee	French	thé
West Frisian	tee	Galician	té	German	Tee	Greek	τέϊον téïon	Hebrew	תה, te
Hungarian	tea	Icelandic	te	Indonesian	teh	Irish	tae	Italian	tè
Javanese	tèh	Kannada	ಟೀಸೊಪ್ಪು ṭīsoppu	Khmer	តែ tae	scientific Latin	thea	Latvian	tēja
Leonese	té	Limburgish	tiè	Lithuanian	arbata(1)	Low Saxon	Tee [tʰɛˑɪ] or Tei [tʰaˑɪ]	Malay	teh
Malayalam	തേയില tēyilai	Maltese	tè	Norwegian	te	Occitan	tè	Polish	herbata(1)
Scots	tea [tiː] ~ [teː]	Scottish Gaelic	tì, teatha	Sinhalese	tē තේ	Spanish	té	Sundanese	entèh
Swedish	te	Tamil	தேநீர் tēnīr (3)	Telugu	తేనీరు tēnīr (4)	Western Ukrainian	gerbata(1)	Welsh	te

Notes:

• ⁽¹⁾ from Latin herba thea, found in Polish, Western Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Kashubian (for Belarussian and Western Ukrainian the g- is pronounced as h-)[18]
• ⁽²⁾ té or thé, but this term is considered archaic and is a literary expression; since roughly the beginning of the 20th century, čaj is used for "tea" in Czech language, see the following table
• ⁽³⁾ nīr means water; tēyilai means "tea leaf" (ilai "leaf")
• ⁽⁴⁾ nīru means water; ṭīyāku means "tea leaf" (āku = leaf in Telugu)

Derivatives of cha

Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name
Chinese	茶 Chá	Assamese	চাহ sah	Bengali	চা cha (sa in Eastern regions)	Kapampangan	cha	Cebuano	tsá
English	cha or char	Gujarati	ચા chā	Japanese	茶, ちゃ cha(1)	Kannada	ಚಹಾ chahā	Khasi	sha
Punjabi	ਚਾਹ cha	Korean	차 cha(1)	Kurdish	ça	Lao	ຊາ /saː˦˥/	Marathi	चहा chahā
Oḍiā	ଚା cha	Persian	چای chā	Portuguese	chá	Sindhi	chahen چانهه	Somali	shaah
Tagalog	tsaá	Thai	ชา /t͡ɕʰaː˧/	Tibetan	ཇ་ ja	Vietnamese	trà and chè(2)

Notes:

• ⁽¹⁾ The main pronunciations of 茶 in Korea and Japan are 차 cha and ちゃ cha, respectively. (Japanese ocha (おちゃ) is honorific.) These are connected with the pronunciations at the capitals of the Song and Ming dynasties.
• ⁽²⁾ Trà and chè are variant pronunciations of 茶; the latter is used mainly in northern Vietnam and describes a tea made with freshly picked leaves.

Derivatives of chay

Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name
Albanian	çaj	Amharic	ሻይ shay	Arabic	شاي shāy	Assyrian Neo-Aramaic	ܟ݈ܐܝ chai	Eastern Armenian	թեյ tey
Azerbaijani	çay	Bosnian	čaj	Bulgarian	чай chai	Chechen	чай chay	Croatian	čaj
Czech	čaj	English	chai	Finnish dialectal	tsai, tsaiju, saiju or saikka	Georgian	ჩაი chai	Greek	τσάι tsái
Hindi	चाय chāy	Kazakh	шай shai	Kyrgyz	чай chai	Kinyarwanda	icyayi	Judaeo-Spanish	צ'יי chai
Macedonian	чај čaj	Malayalam	ചായ chaaya	Mongolian	цай tsai	Nepali	chiyā चिया	Pashto	چای chay
Persian	چای chāī (1)	Romanian	ceai	Russian	чай chay	Serbian	чај čaj	Slovak	čaj
Slovene	čaj	Swahili	chai	Tajik	чой choy	Tatar	чәй çäy	Tlingit	cháayu
Turkish	çay	Turkmen	çaý	Ukrainian	чай chai	Urdu	چائے chai	Uzbek	choy

Notes:

• ⁽¹⁾ Derived from the earlier pronunciation چا cha.

Others

Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name
Japanese	だ da, た ta (1)	Korean	다 da [ta] (1)	Burmese	lahpet [ləpʰɛʔ](2)
Thai	miang(3)	Lamet	meng	Tai	la

• ⁽¹⁾ Note that cha is the common pronunciation of "tea" in Japanese and Korean.
• ⁽²⁾ Fermented tea leaves eaten as a meal
• ⁽³⁾ Fermented tea

References

1. Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh (2009). The True History of Tea. Thames & Hudson. pp. 262–264. ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1.
2. Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh (2009). The True History of Tea. Thames & Hudson. pp. 264–265. ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1.
3. Albert E. Dien (2007). Six Dynasties Civilization. Yale University Press. p. 362. ISBN 978-0300074048.
4. Bret Hinsch (2011). The ultimate guide to Chinese tea.
5. Nicola Salter (2013). Hot Water for Tea: An inspired collection of tea remedies and aromatic elixirs for your mind and body, beauty and soul. ArchwayPublishing. p. 4. ISBN 978-1606932476.
6. Peter T. Daniels, ed. (1996). The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. p. 203. ISBN 978-0195079937.
7. "「茶」的字形與音韻變遷(提要)". Archived from the original on 2010-09-29.
8. Keekok Lee (2008). Warp and Weft, Chinese Language and Culture. Eloquent Books. p. 97. ISBN 978-1606932476.
9. "Why we call tea "cha" and "te"?", Hong Kong Museum of Tea Ware, archived from the original on 2018-01-16, retrieved 2014-08-25
10. Dahl, Östen. "Feature/Chapter 138: Tea". The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Max Planck Digital Library. Retrieved 4 June 2008.
11. Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado, Anthony Xavier Soares (June 1988). Portuguese Vocables in Asiatic Languages: From the Portuguese Original of Monsignor Sebastiao Rodolfo Dalgado, Volume 1. South Asia Books. pp. 94–95. ISBN 978-8120604131.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link)
12. Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh (2009). The True History of Tea. Thames & Hudson. p. 263. ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1.
13. "Chai". American Heritage Dictionary. Archived from the original on 2014-02-18. Chai: A beverage made from spiced black tea, honey, and milk. ETYMOLOGY: Ultimately from Chinese (Mandarin) chá.
14. "tea". Online Etymology Dictionary. The Portuguese word (attested from 1550s) came via Macao; and Rus. chai, Pers. cha, Gk. tsai, Arabic shay, and Turk. çay all came overland from the Mandarin form.
15. "char". Oxford English Dictionary.
16. "tea". Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
17. "chai". Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
18. Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh (2009). The True History of Tea. Thames & Hudson. p. 262. ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1.
19. Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh (2009). The True History of Tea. Thames & Hudson. pp. 265–267. ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1.
20. "Tea". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 29 June 2012.
21. Chrystal, Paul. Tea: A Very British Beverage. ISBN 9781445633602.