Talk:Etymology of tea

T.E.A.

Hi, I've been told and I found in the internet that the word "tea" would derive from a confusion on the meaning of the letters "T.E.A." on the first supplies of tea leaves to Great Britain, the actual meaning of "TEA" having been "Transporte de Ervas Aromaticas" in Portuguese language - see here: https://ilastinwanderlust.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/guimaraes-where-t-e-a-comes-from/
This looks like a kind of urban legend, but would someone here be able to refute it with references? It might be useful to add it to the article as well.
Thanks, Kostia (talk) 15:57, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

This is just too silly to deserve any treatment anywhere. The article describes the rich entanglement of the various (well, three, really) base forms of the name, and where they came from. Any idiot can make up a silly story for the internet; unless such an urban myth had been accepted for a half-century at some stage, it does not deserve a mention. Imaginatorium (talk) 16:36, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Japanese / Korean

When and how do Japanese and Korean use words like da/ta for tea, and in that case, aren't they also derived from Chinese, just as cha? It looks similar as to how Japanese uses the root sa- for tea in certain compounds, such as kissaten. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:06, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

Chai as a separate category

The northern derived pronunciation referenced in the chai section is not substantively different from the root of all of the other cha variations. Additionally, most other online sources discussing this topic only recognize two buckets of pronunciation, tea and cha. 2600:1700:721:5D40:9590:E922:B85B:FB59 (talk) 22:24, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

Indeed. If "tea" and "thé" are considered the same category, "chá" and "chai" should also be considered the same category. They both only have one difference, the ending vowel sound - in the former case, the long high unrounded vowel [iː] vs. the mid-front unrounded vowel [e]; in the latter case, the open front unrounded vowel [a] vs. the diphthong [aɪ]. Arguably, because chai contains the [a] phoneme, it's actually *more* similar to chà than thè is to tea.

On top of this, it's difficult not to notice the lack of citations for all claims for a 3-bucket classification, while the rest of the article is generally well-referenced. Octopirate (talk) 16:56, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

Moroccan name

Could someone share a source for the Moroccan and Berber name please? Thank you. MoroccanTeaEnjoyer (talk) 15:55, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

Iranian Chay

Can we please stop viewing history from an exclusively western pov and refer to “Persian” and “Persia” from a native pov where we are IRANIANS? Chances are the people who borrowed Chay and introduced it into Iranian culture were probably ancestors of the modern day Tajiks or Pashtuns, not the actual modern day Persians. For the most part, Persian and Persia is just an exonym. It’s about time we called everything historical “Iran” or “Iranian”. 86.21.89.89 (talk) 10:45, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

AFAIK, Iran officially started calling itself Iran during the Ilkhanate regime, in the 13th century. The Silk Road, OTOH, knew its heyday between 206 BC and 220 AD, and at that time whoever lived there, including the Graeco-Romans whose name for the region (admittedly an exonym) was "Persia", was drinking tea and giving it a name. — Tonymec (talk) 07:59, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Tea pronunciation borrowings

This is just stupid to even need discussion. The Japanese didn't borrow the word tea multiple times, they just borrowed different pronunciations multiple times. You just have to check the check the sadō (Japanese tea ceremony) linked to see that it can be pronounced sadō or chadō, the same word 茶 can be pronounced sa or cha. Sino-Xenic pronunciations are borrowings of Chinese pronunciations and they may be pronounced differently because they were borrowed at different time, so you have Kan-on, Go-on and Tō-on. It's not that different from some countries that previously used British pronunciations of English words, and then started using American pronunciations under the influence of American media (e.g. pronunciations of "schedule"), so you ended up with two different pronunciations of the same word. Hzh (talk) 18:20, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

It helps not to start off asserting stupidity. Your second sentence is not very clear, but normally the different ways of reading 茶 are called (just that) "readings", not "pronunciations", and 茶 would be referred to as a "character" rather than a "word".

Anyway the article talks about the three main classes of word for tea, referring to them by approximations of the different Chinese pronunciations as te, cha and chai. The English, French, and Italian words for tea all come from the first, even though they are, in English, French, and Italian pronounced differently. Imaginatorium (talk) 19:01, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

Those are on'yomi readings, which are based on Chinese pronunciations. Reading here is the same as pronunciation. No idea what kind of differentiation you are trying to make. Words in other languages are irrelevant to different pronunciations of the same word or character in Japanese. Hzh (talk) 19:55, 26 October 2024 (UTC)