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Even if you can't understand spoken Taiwanese, you can learn a lot from these two videos because of the excellent visuals, plus it is nice just to hear the clearly spoken Taigi and compare terms in Taigi with their parallels in Sino-Korean.

The first is a video from Taiwan's public TV (公視台語台) on the interesting distribution of the names of tea in the world:

The second video presents the similarities between (literary) Taiwanese and Sino-Korean pronunciations:

It packs in a lot of information about the circulation of sinographs, topolects, and texts in East Asia, together with the history of individuals who were responsible for these transformational movements, not to mention the phonology whereby to explain them.

Selected readings

• "Using Sinitic characters in Korea" (7/3/15)
• "Korean oralization of Literary Sinitic" (4/23/24)
• Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia:  The Making of National Languages", Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751 — for me personally, the most important linguistic impact of Buddhism was its legitimization of the written vernacular in China
• "English incorporated in a Sinograph" (11/18/19) — "tea" as phonophore
• "Sinographs for 'tea'" (1/10/19)
• "Multilingual tea packaging" (4/7/18)
• "Caucasian words for tea" (1/26/17)
• "Trump tea " (1/13/17)
• "Don't Kettle " (11/4/10)
• "Don't eat the water " (3/17/15)
• "Two brews " (2/6/10)
• "cactus wawa: the strange tale of a strange character" (11/1/14)
• "Cactus Wawa revisited" (4/24/16)
• "Things you can do with 'water' in Cantonese " (4/2/19)
• "Bubble tea blooper " (9/28/17)
• "Lap Sangsouchong " (12/3/14)
• "Kung-fu (Gongfu) Tea " (7/20/11)
• "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".

[Thanks to Chau Wu]

June 25, 2025 @ 1:20 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Abbreviation, Language and food, Topolects

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