Etymology of tea

Origins

Tea etymologies in various Asian languages

• These are alternative Sino-xenic pronunciations, borrowed from Middle Chinese. Note that cha is the common pronunciation of "tea" in Japanese and Korean.
• Possible Sino-xenic origins
• Smoked tea aged in bamboo tubes
• Umbrella term for tea, including fermented tea leaves eaten as a meal
• Fermented tea, cha is used in other contexts

Chinese etymologies

• Te is from the Amoy tê of Hokkien dialect in southern Fujian. The ports of Xiamen 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" pronunciation may come from the Cantonese pronunciation tsa around Guangzhou 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 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 which acquired the word under the influence of the Mughals.

Pronunciations of 茶 in Sinitic languages

Derivations from ''te'' and ''cha''

• Portuguese traders were the first Europeans to import the herb in large amounts. The Portuguese borrowed their word for tea from Cantonese in the 1550s via their trading posts in the south of China, especially Macau.
• In Central Asia, Mandarin cha developed into Persian chay, and this form spread with Central Asian trade and cultural influence.
• Russia encountered tea in Central Asia.
• The Dutch word for "tea" 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. The Dutch first imported tea around 1606 from Macao via Bantam, Java, and played a dominant role in the early European tea trade through the Dutch East India Company, influencing other European languages, including English, French, Spanish, and German.
• The Dutch first introduced tea to England in 1644. 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.

• In North America, the word chai is used to refer almost exclusively to the Indian masala chai beverage, in contrast to tea itself.
• The inverse pattern is seen in Moroccan Arabic where shay means "generic, or black Middle Eastern tea" whereas atay 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— from British exports in the 19th century.
• 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 comes from the Russian word Чай. However, tea in Polish is herbata, which, as well as Belarusian гарба́та and Lithuanian arbata, was derived from the Dutch herba thee, although a minority believes that it was derived Latin herba thea, meaning "tea herb."
• 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". 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 in British English.

Derivatives of ''te''

• from Latin herba thea, found in Polish, Western Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Kashubian
• 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; see the following table
• nīr means water; tēyilai means "tea leaf"
• nīru means water; ṭīyāku means "tea leaf"

Derivatives of ''sa'', ''cha'' or ''chai''

• The main pronunciations of 茶 in Korea and Japan are 차 cha and ちゃ cha, respectively.
• Trà and chè are variant pronunciations of 茶; the latter is the colloquial reading and is solely used in Northern Vietnamese dialects to describe the tea plant, tea leaf and nước chè, a drink made from freshly boiled raw tea leaves while trà is widely used for all contexts. Chè also has another meaning which is an umbrella term for puddings and desserts.

• Derived from the earlier pronunciation چا cha.