世界上的“茶”为什么有两种叫法?
Cha or tea? Why the world has two words for tea
Name: ________________ Date: ________
Key words
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 等于 | děngyú | to equal; to be equivalent to; to amount to |
| 统计 | tǒngjì | statistics; to count; to add up |
| 念 | niàn | to read aloud |
| 读音 | dúyīn | pronunciation (of a word or character) |
| 学者 | xuézhě | scholar; academic |
| 出自 | chūzì | to come from; to originate from |
| 欧洲 | ōuzhōu | Europe |
| 当地 | dāngdì | local; in the locality |
| 商人 | shāngrén | merchant; businessman |
| 一路 | yílù | all the way; throughout the journey |
| 传 | chuán | to pass on; to transmit |
| 大多 | dàduō | mostly; for the most part |
English (for the teacher)
In an American café you might spot a spiced milk tea on the menu called a “chai tea latte”: literally, a “tea tea latte”. It isn’t a misprint. The first two words of its name are Hindi for “tea” and English for “tea”. Order one, and you’ve said “tea” twice in a row.
What’s more interesting is that both words started out in China. In most of the world’s languages, the word for tea belongs to one of two big families: one sounds like Mandarin chá, and Russian, Persian, Turkish and Japanese are in it; the other starts with a “t” sound, and English, French, German and Spanish are among its members. One world atlas of languages surveyed 230 of them: 110 were in the first family, 84 in the second, and the other 36 had other words for it.
Both families actually go back to the same Chinese character. Mandarin and Cantonese both say chá, but in Southern Min, spoken in southern Fujian and Taiwan, the word sounds almost exactly like Spanish té. English “tea” once sounded much the same, until a change in English vowels gave it the sound it has today. How can one character have two pronunciations? Scholars of ancient Chinese pronunciation believe these readings all grew from one old sound that slowly changed from place to place.
So which sound does a country end up with? It comes down to who it bought its tea from. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company became the main carrier of tea to Europe. The Dutch picked up the Southern Min pronunciation and sold the tea, name and all, across Europe; that is where the English, French and German words come from. In Indonesia, once ruled by the Dutch, the word for tea has this sound too. As for where the Dutch learned the word, accounts differ: some say Xiamen, some say Taiwan, and some say Java, from merchants there.
The tea that went west overland took the chá sound with it. On its way through Central Asia and Persia it picked up an extra sound at the end, so that it sounded like chái, “firewood”; India, Russia, Turkey and the Arab world all use words of this kind. Japanese and Korean, meanwhile, had borrowed their word for tea straight from Chinese much earlier.
So it looks as if the “t” word travelled by sea and chá by land. But there is one big exception: the Portuguese. They got there even earlier than the Dutch: in the sixteenth century, Portuguese missionaries and merchants were already coming to China by ship. But their base was Macau, where people speak Cantonese, so the Portuguese called it chá as well.
Once a name sticks, it is often hard to change. By the nineteenth century, the British bought most of their tea directly from Guangzhou, where it is also chá, yet the English word never changed. Some words belong to neither family, such as the Polish word for tea. But it comes from Latin for “tea herb”, and the “tea” in it is that same “t” word after all.
So next time you see a “tea tea latte”, don’t laugh at it for saying the same thing twice. Its two teas, one that travelled by land and one by sea, went most of the way round the world before meeting again in the same cup.