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Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

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Re: Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

#41

Post by brigade »

kriro wrote: post #31
kybernetikos wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true from a language/ word usage point of view. E.g https://www.amazon.co.uk/dandelion-tea/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i...

Well yes the term tea is used "in the wrong way" a lot and one could argue that it is common enough that it's the right usage these days (language evolves etc.). But technically tea is only from camelia sinensis varieties. So the "herbal teas" should technically be called something else like tisane.

Chinese call herbal teas “liang cha”; the argument that “herbal tea” should not be called tea is a somewhat modern English notion. Other languages freely use tea/cha for infusions of many plants.

Heck, why not argue that any “tisane” not made from barley isn’t a real tisane.

Re: Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

#42

Post by bitcoinusername »

smcl wrote: post #36
bitcoinusername wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Croatia it is "čaj". Although it has a coast on Adriatic and coastal people use "čaj" as a word too, despite Italian influence (which uses tè for tea). Even people on islands that were influenced hugely by the Republic of Venice.

I'm curious - was the Croat language (or some parent of it) pretty predominant during the times of the Republic of Venice? Or is that a "new" thing after the unification of Yugoslavia, and prior to that Italian (or some Venetian dialect) was widely spoken?

People living on the island Hvar speak quite a unique version of Croatian. The Venice influence is huge there, graveyard is filled with gravestones of 16th+ century elite.

I sometimes find them hard to understand due to heavy usage of words with Italian roots. But their grammar is equivalent to Croatian grammar.

They also use the word "čaj".

I'd say Croatian as a language was popular and was heavily used on coastal areas even before Italian influence, and after too.

Re: Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

#46

Post by _0nac »

ekianjo wrote: post #33

Tea to Japan was certainly not "by land". I know they want to make it into a simple rule, but that's just not as simple as they pretend.

The friendly article notes that both Japan and Korea likely acquired the word long before the Silk Road.

Relevant random factoid: it's possible to tell when many Chinese words were imported into Japan based on the pronunciation, which varies based on where the Chinese capital (and hence the ruling class dialect) happened to be. See "Onyomi" under https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji.

Re: Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

#47

Post by jpatokal »

tsing wrote: post #24
taejo wrote: post #19

Kind of strange that this refers to "Sinitic" contrasting to "Min Nan" when Min Nan is a Sinitic language.

Just learnt that "Min Nan" dialect can be referred to "Hokkien"

"Hokkien" is an approximation of how "Fujian" is pronounced in Min Nan, which in turn means "Southern Min" (dialect/language).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Min

Re: Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

#49

Post by k3liutZu »

summner wrote: post #43
yetihehe wrote: post #6

Polish language has "herbata", which is a third one, from herbs.

But where do we boil water for "herba-ta"? In "Czajnik" (keetle), where root "czaj" most definately comes from "cha".

And the close neighbors of Romania we say "ceainic" to kettle which does come from the root word "ceai".
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