Origin and History: Tea Plantation in Assam, India
Uploaded by
priyankaOrigin and History: Tea Plantation in Assam, India
Uploaded by
priyankaThe Chinese character for tea is 茶, originally written with an extra stroke as 荼 (pronounced tú, used as a word
for a bitter herb), and acquired its current form during the Tang Dynasty.[10][11][12] 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.[13] One suggestion is that the different pronunciations may have arisen from the
different words for tea in ancient China, for example tú (荼) may have given rise to tê;[14] historical phonologists
however argued that the cha, te and dzo all arose from the same root with a reconstructed pronunciation dra,
which changed due to sound shift through the centuries.[15] There were other ancient words for tea,
though ming (茗) is the only other one still in common use.[15][16] It has been proposed that the Chinese words for
tea, tu, chaand ming, may have been borrowed from the Austro-Asiatic languages of people who inhabited
southwest China; cha for example may have been derived from an archaic Austro-Asiatic root *la, meaning
"leaf".[17]
Tea plantation in Assam, India
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 from which the Chinese words for tea might have been
borrowed originally:[15] northeast Burma and southwest Yunnan. Examples are la (meaning tea purchased
elsewhere) and miiem (wild tea gathered in the hills) from the Wa people, letpet in Burmese and meng in Lamet
meaning "fermented tea leaves", as well as miang in Thai ("fermented tea").
Most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce it along the lines of cha,
but Hokkien and Teochew Chinese varieties along the Southern coast of China pronounce it like teh. These
two pronunciations have made their separate ways into other languages around the world.[18]
Starting in the early 17th century, the Dutch played a dominant role in the early European tea trade via
the Dutch East India Company.[19]The Dutch borrowed the word for "tea" (thee) from Min Chinese, either
through trade directly from Hokkien speakers in Formosa where they had established a port, or from Malay
traders in Bantam, Java.[20] The Dutch then introduced to other European languages this Min pronunciation for
tea, including English tea, French thé, Spanish té, and German Tee.[21] This pronunciation is also the most
common form worldwide.[22] The Cha pronunciation came from the Cantonese chàh of Guangzhou(Canton) and
the ports of Hong Kong and Macau, which were also major points of contact, especially with the Portuguese
traders who settled Macau in the 16th century. The Portuguese adopted the Cantonese pronunciation "chá",
and spread it to India.[20] However, the Korean and Japanese pronunciations of cha were not from Cantonese,
but were borrowed into Korean and Japanese during earlier periods of Chinese history.
A third form, the increasingly widespread chai, came from Persian [ چایtʃɒːi] chay. Both the châ and chây forms
are found in Persian dictionaries.[23] They are derived from the Northern Chinese pronunciation of chá,[24] which
passed overland to Central Asia and Persia, where it picked up the Persian grammatical suffix -yi before
passing on to Russian as чай ([tɕæj], chay), Arabic as ( شايpronounced shay [ʃæiː] due to the lack of
a /t͡ʃ/ sound in Arabic), Urdu as چائےchay, Hindi as चचच chāy, Turkish as çay, etc.[25] English has all three
forms: cha or char (both pronounced /tʃɑː/), attested from the 16th century; tea, from the 17th; and chai, from
the 20th. However, the form chai refers specifically to a black tea mixed with sugar or honey, spices and milk in
contemporary English.[26]
