 | N/D09 - Tea from Tay to Teaposted by TeaHouseTimes Admin, ADVERTISER TEA RELATED PRODUCTSThursday, December 10th 2009 @ 6:42 PM |
From the November/December 2009 issue of The Tea House Times.
The name for tea is derived not from the standard (Mandarin) Chinese name cha but from the same word in the Amoy dialect. The Dutch carried on their earliest China trade from Java, where they met Chinese junks out of the port of Amoy (Xiamen) in Fujian province, just across the strait from Taiwan. Thus they learned the Amoy name te (pronounced “tay,” but more like “day”) and took it to Europe. As all European countries except Russia and Portugal bought their first tea from the Dutch, they too used this name. The Portugese, who traded out of the port of Macao, near Guangzhou, base their word on the Cantonese-derived cha.
It is still unclear whether “tay” or “tea” first came to England. In his 1660 diary entry Samuel Pepys wrote “tee,” but in 1711, Alexander Pope still rhymed it with “obey” in “The Rape of the Lock,” a sound which may have been a fashionable borrowing from the French. In poems from 1712 and 1720 it rhymes indisputably with “knee,” indicating that a change must have taken place around that time. The Irish and some others still say “tay.”
*Taken from All the Tea in China by Kit Chow and Ione Kramer. Used by Permission. China Books. www.chinabooks.com Book includes a chart of probable etymological derivation of the word ‘tea’ in various languages. See also Book Review under Lady Gayle's Picks of the Trade.
