The second group of languages describes tea with a word pronounced something like "tey"-the way our English word tea used to be pronounced. I've extracted this map from a more complete map in WALS, the monumental World Atlas of Language Structure Online, from the chapter on tea written by Östen Dahl. Why these languages with these two forms? Below I've shown the same data plotted on a map showing Eurasia and parts of Africa, with all the forms beginning with the sound "ch" in red and the forms starting with "t" in blue. Some languages have a word starting with "t" like our tea (and German Tee and Spanish té), while others have a word starting with "ch" like cha in Japanese and Portuguese, or chai in Russian, Mongolian, and Hindi. Roughly around the turn of the 17th century, tea began to spread around the globe, and languages around the world borrowed the word from Chinese, in two distinct forms. As the Chinese language diversified, words for tea began to diversify as well, becoming cha in Mandarin and Cantonese and te in the Southern Min dialect spoken in Fujian and Taiwan. Tea slowly spread to neighboring countries, as the early Chinese powdered tea traditions ritualized in the matcha of the Japanese tea ceremony and yak-butter tea became a staple in Tibet. Mair and Hoh postulate that early Chinese speakers borrowed the word *la too as they immigrated south into Yunnan, and over time *la changed to *lra and then, by sometime around 500 CE, the Middle Chinese form *dra.įor the next thousand years, tea culture and the word for tea developed in China. As other groups like the Tibeto-Burmans moved into the area, they borrowed *la that's the origin of the la ('tea/leaf') in Burmese tea laphet. Mair and Erling Hoh postulate in their terrific The True History of Tea (check out Appendix C which has the linguistic details) that the earliest Mon-Khmer used a word like *la (the * means a word in a hypothetical proto-language) to mean 'tea' or 'leaf'. Tea plays many important roles in this region as a beverage, a salad, a ritual item, and regional groups in northern Laos or Thailand even ferment tea leaves in bamboo tubes, sprinkle them with salt and chew them like plugs of chewing tobacco. A number of linguistic groups arrived in this region very early, first speakers of Mon-Khmer (a proto-language that is the ancestor of Cambodian, Vietnamese and many smaller languages scattered around southeast Asia), and then Tibeto-Burman (the family that includes Burmese) and Tai-Kadai (the ancestor of Thai and other smaller languages). The tea plant, camellia sinensis, is native to a wide area that includes this region, and it was probably somewhere near here that it was domesticated. The story begins where the far southwest of China's Yunnan province meets northeastern Burma and Thailand, somewhere between the Mekong, Irawaddy, and Salween rivers. These tea words ("tea", "cha", "chai", "matcha", "laphet") are players in an unusual linguistic story, in which two differing pronunciations of a word reflect the two ways that Europe and Asia have traded over the last 500 years: by land or by sea. For the recipe, check out Naomi Duguid's fantastic Burma: Rivers of Flavor.īut tea is even more than a delicious beverage or refreshing salad. Laphet toke, often called the national dish of Myanmar, is a stimulating caffeinated Burmese dish, served at the end of a meal, or at celebrations, made with fermented tea leaves ( laphet in Burmese), dried shrimp, yellow peas, peanuts, sesame and crisp fried garlic. If you prefer to eat your tea, there's yet another option: the refreshing laphet toke, the Burmese tea leaf salad that is the signature dish of the growing number of popular Burmese restaurants like Burma Superstar.
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