茶

The etymology of the various words for ''tea'' reflects the history of transmission of tea drinking culture and trade from China to countries around the world. Nearly all of the words for tea worldwide fall into three broad groups: ''te'', ''cha'' and ''chai'', present in English as ''tea'', ''cha'' or ''char'', and ''chai''. The earliest of the three to enter English is ''cha'', which came in the 1590s via the Portuguese, who traded in Macao and picked up the Cantonese pronunciation of the word. The more common ''tea'' form arrived in the 17th century via the Dutch, who acquired it either indirectly from the Malay ''teh'', or directly from the ''tê'' pronunciation in Min Chinese. The third form ''chai'' (meaning "spiced tea") originated from a northern Chinese pronunciation of ''cha'', which travelled overland to Central Asia and Persia where it picked up a Persian ending ''yi'', and entered English via Hindustani in the 20th century.

The different regional pronunciations of the word in China are believed to have arisen from the same root, which diverged due to sound changes through the centuries. The written form of the word in Chinese 茶 was created in the mid-Tang dynasty by modifying the character 荼 (pronounced ''tu'') that meant "bitter vegetable". ''Tu'' was used to refer to a variety of plants in ancient China, and acquired the additional meaning of "tea" by the Han dynasty. The Chinese word for tea was likely ultimately derived from the non-Sinitic languages of the botanical homeland of the tea plant in southwest China (or Burma), possibly from an archaic Austro-Asiatic root word *''la'', meaning "leaf".

Pronunciation

The Chinese character for tea is 茶, originally written with an extra horizontal stroke as 荼 (pronounced ''tu''), and acquired its current form in the Tang dynasty first used in the eighth-century treatise on tea ''The Classic of Tea''. The word ''tú'' appears in ancient Chinese texts such as ''Shijing'' signifying a kind of "bitter vegetable" () and refers to various plants such as sow thistle, chicory, or smartweed, and also used to refer to tea during the Han dynasty. By the Northern Wei the word ''tu'' also appeared with a wood radical, meaning a tea tree. The word 茶 first introduced during the Tang dynasty refers exclusively to tea. It 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. One suggestion is that the pronunciation of ''tu'' (荼) gave rise to ''tê''; but historical phonologists believe that ''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. 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), but ''ming'' is the only other word for tea still in common use.

Most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce it along the lines of ''cha'', but Min 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:
*Te is from the Amoy ''tê'' of Hokkien dialect in southern Fujian. 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 Taiwan where they had established a port, or indirectly via Malay traders in Bantam, Java. The Dutch pronunciation of ''thee'' then spread to other countries in Western Europe. This pronunciation gives rise to English "tea" and similar words in other languages, and is the most common form worldwide.
*Cha originated from different parts of China. The "cha" pronuniation may come from the Cantonese pronunciation ''tsa'' around 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. Chai (Persian: چای ''chay'') might have been derived from Northern Chinese pronunciation of ''chá'', which passed overland to Central Asia and Persia, where it picked up the Persian ending ''-yi'' before passing on to Russian, Arabic, Turkish, etc. The ''chai'' pronunciation first entered English either via Russian or Arabic in the early 20th century, and then as a word for " spiced tea" via Hindi-Urdu