Tea map
« previous post | next post »
https://imgur.com/q15pXDT
It's impressive looking, and they very roughly have the correct idea, but they'd better read Appendix C of The True History of Tea more carefully to get the details right, going back to the Urwort, which is not Sinitic, nor even Proto-Sino-Tibetan, but Austroasiatic (Wa, Mon-Khmer, Munda, etc.).
Selected reading
- "Sinographs for 'tea'" (1/10/19)
- "Caucasian words for tea " (1/26/17)
- "Multilingual tea packaging " (4/7/18)
- "Trump tea " (1/13/17)
- "Kung-fu (Gongfu) Tea " (7/20/11)
- "Two brews " (2/6/10)
- "Mandarin Pu'er / Cantonese Bolei 普洱" (8/5/11)
- Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh, The True History of Tea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), especially Appendix C on the linguistics of "tea").
[h.t. Michael Carr]
cameron said,
September 29, 2022 @ 7:11 pm
I like how the text label for Australia is upside down
David Morris said,
September 30, 2022 @ 1:17 am
Australia is 'down under' but NZ isn't?
AntC said,
September 30, 2022 @ 2:24 am
but NZ isn't?
Neither South Africa.
At least NZ is _on_ the map. There's plenty of 'world maps' that leave it out entirely. Warning: kiwi humour
Chris Button said,
September 30, 2022 @ 7:03 am
Quibble with the Burmese part. It is the “lak” part that corresponds. The second part means “leaf”. So Written Burmese "lak(phak)" (now pronounced /ləpʰɛʔ/) means tea(leaf). You then need to add the word for water at the end of that to make it into the drink.
Jonathan Smith said,
September 30, 2022 @ 8:00 am
Another quibble is the suggestion that the ch~t doublets in Korean/Japanese/Vietnamese are "via" Mandarin~Cantonese vs. Min…
Philip Anderson said,
October 1, 2022 @ 2:00 pm
Char is very much slang in British English, and rather old-fashioned now; borrowed from India during the Raj.
Wales is shown on the map, but the Welsh word is not: it’s ‘te’ (earlier tê) /te:/, borrowed from English in the C18th with the pronunciation of the time.
Andreas Johansson said,
October 4, 2022 @ 12:46 am
So what's up with the ridiculously long Tswana word?