ecn-pa:scott (03/11/83)
There are a few words which are almost the same in a *lot* of languages, like "ma", "pa", etc. One word in that class is the word "tea". I don't know of any good reason why this should be true, but here is "tea" in the languages that I know about. I've written it more or less phonetically (sorry, not IPA) for comparisons sake. Does anybody know why this is true? English t'i French te German te Russian chai Hindi chai Mandarin ts'a Cantonese ts'a Vietnamese cha Random House says that it comes from the Amoy dialect of Chinese (t'e), but it seems unlikely to me that it could have spread so well to so many languages. Scott Deerwester Purdue University
jss (03/12/83)
It appears that tea came from China, carrying its name(s) with it. It has always appeared to me, on no authority whatsoever, that there were two names (in two dialects of Chinese?), one approximately 'tea', and the other more or less 'cha'. I have met one language, Ukrainian, in which 'tea' was not one of those words. They use something like 'infusion', which is, of course, the general word for steeped herbs (or anything else, I guess). The French use 'infusion' for herbal teas. I'll bet a lot of other European languages do, too. Any information out there? judith schrier !decvax!brunix!jss
donn (03/13/83)
Reference: ecn-pa.791
If you think about it for a while, the word for tea is pretty obviously
a borrowing; after all half of the languages on the given list are
spoken in an area where tea was not used by the population until 500
years ago or so. The variation in form is dependent on how recently
the word was borrowed, what words in the borrowing language normally
sound like (borrowings often assimilate to native word patterns) and
what the borrowed-from language is (not infrequently a language will
borrow a word in another language that was originally a borrowing in
yet another language...).
The term cognate is most often used in linguistics for words in
different languages that have a common "genetic" origin; that is to
say, the modern words developed from a word that existed in the common
ancestor of the languages. For example the English "five", the German
"fuenf" and the French "cinq" are cognates despite their dissimilarity;
I think they all stem from a very much older word that sounded like
"kwinkwe" (or for those who prefer Anglicized phonetic orthography
(sigh), like "queenquay"). Sometimes the differences in pronunciation
and spelling between the words are large, sometimes not. For example,
the word for five in Malay is "lima" (pronounced somewhat like the
capital of Peru and NOT like most Americans pronounce the name of the
bean) and it is the same in Hawaiian (also meaning "hand") and also (as
I recall) in Malagasy, the language of Madagascar. Some words sound
(or are spelled) the same in different languages but are not
genetically related; these are "false cognates". My favorite example
is the Indonesian word "air", which is pronounced like the English word
"ire" and means "water". A "truk" with "AIR" printed on its back is
a water truck.
Etymology is the study of the origins of words.
Philology is etymology as an end in itself.
Historical linguistics is the study of why there has to be etymology.
A mere Linguistics grad student,
Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn
UCSD Linguistics Dept. sdamos!donn@nprdcz (03/14/83)
Even in Tibetan, a language related to very little else, tea is "ja".
dave (03/14/83)
Since tea originated in China, it's not surprising that its name should have followed it wherever it went. Incidentally, the Portuguese word for tea is "cha" also. Another interesting one: the word for "date" (the edible kind) in Hebrew is "tamar", and in Portugues is "tamara". Were dates brought by the Moors from North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula? Dave Sherman Toronto
jgpo (03/15/83)
Hungarian is a Finno-Ugrian language and differs markedly from the more familiar Indo-European languages. The Magyar word for "tea" is "tea". However, since there are no diphthongs in Hungrian, it is pronounced something like "teh' ah". John
mark (03/17/83)
#R:cca:-443700:zinfandel:9300014:000:398 zinfandel!mark Mar 15 20:58:00 1983 Yes, in fact the Moors brought dates all the way to England, where they were a favorite food. In fact, the Moors couldn't bring enough to keep the English happy. They were always out of dates, waiting for the next shipment to arrive. "When will our dates arrive?" they would ask the Moors. And the Moors would answer "tamara". Cognates abound. :-) Mark Wittenberg ...!decvax!sytek!zehntel!mark
urban (03/23/83)
The Welsh language regularly turned proto-Celtic 'k' (as in kwinkwe 'five', remember?) into 'p'. So, in medieval Welsh texts, one will see 'five' written as 'pump'. Professor Ford at UCLA points out that we can see the effects of early Welsh immigration here in Southern California: in the San Fernando valley, one sees a sign reading "Pump Plant". This clearly refers to ancient Celtic rituals involving five children... Mike