Taiwanese Twosome: tea and Sino-Korean
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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]
Robert Eng said,
June 25, 2025 @ 6:33 pm
Two very informative videos! Chinese readers who don't understand spoken Taiwanese can turn on Chinese subtitles through the CC button.
Jongseong Park said,
June 26, 2025 @ 12:34 am
Sino-Korean readings very well could have come from Tang-era Chang'an (modern Xi'an) pronunciation as shown in the second video, but there is no scholarly consensus as far as I am aware. A wide range of theories have been proposed over the years on their origin, from Old Chinese to Song-era Kaifeng pronunciation. Of course, it's possible that multiple sources contributed to the Sino-Korean readings we know today, and the oldest use of Chinese characters in Korea date back to the Han dynasty at least. But it does seem plausible to me that Tang-era Chang'an would have been the single most important source, even if I am not knowledgeable at all about the subject.
I really appreciate the Korean subtitles on the second video. It is really well done in grammatically correct and idiomatic Korean. But the text on screen could have done with more proofreading. I'm not sure where they got the vaguely Pe̍h-ōe-jī-like romanizations "pháng-bok" for 방법 bangbeop or "pún-puh" for 분부 bunbu starting around 1:18.
Also, starting around 9:15, where they put the texts 日本語 Nihongo over Japan and Tiếng Việt over Vietnam, they unfortunately put 나눔명조 Nanum Myeongjo – the name of a font – over Korea. They should have put 한국어 Hangugeo, the name of the Korean language in Korean (in South Korea).
By the way, not being a speaker of tonal languages, I would be hopeless in telling apart 韓語 Hân-gí (Korean language) and 漢語 Hàn-gí (Chinese language) which are used next to each other throughout the video (e.g. in 5:55).
Jonathan Smith said,
June 26, 2025 @ 12:39 am
Ah nice narrated by O͘-pian, what a unicorn. Cool that stuff produced to this standard exists.
bks said,
June 26, 2025 @ 7:53 am
A bit off-topic: One can tune in to a live feed of TV stations around the world, for free, here:
https://tv.garden/
Not sure which, if any, of the Taiwan stations are "clearly spoken Taigi".
KIRINPUTRA said,
June 28, 2025 @ 12:49 am
The TEA-CHAI split is intuitively interesting, but we don’t know what happened at the edges. A new TEA-CHAI map seems to come out every month. They’re misleading. They don’t need to be.
Take the canonical (pronounced) form of Vietnamese TRÀ. It uses a retroflex [ʈ]. It rides the TEA-CHAI fence, which makes sense. TRÀ is neither Hokkien-derived nor Mandarin-derived. It’s too close to the projector; it’s got nothing to do with what the TEA-CHAI crowd came for. The Vietnamese-speaking region should be greyed out on these maps.
What about Cantonese 茶 (CAA4)? Phonetically, it’s on the CHAI side of the split. But it’s also neither Hokkien- nor Mandarin-derived. It’s too close to the projector; it’s not By Land, So Chai. A deeper logic is at work, which is generally inaccessible, unlike the core truth of the TEA-CHAI split. If the By Sea & By Land narrative is what’s offered, the Cantonese-speaking region should also be greyed out, no less than the Vietnamese-speaking region.
Ditto for the Hakka-speaking region, and so on across a swathe of landlocked Chinese & Southeast Asian languages that may not have names in English.
What about TSA in what seems to be all the Christianised Philippine languages? There is distance from the projector. Hokkienese commerce found the ports of Luzon & the Visayas before Magellan, and before it found Formosa. Our core TEA-CHAI intuition says the Philippines should be TEA. So why TSA? There’s a story there, probably involving Cantonese and Macao. Most if not all commentators ignore this story, and ignore Cantonese.
(On Mindanao, Maguindanao has TI, according to SAY Project data. Most or all of the maps also whiff on this. It would be interesting to know whether the word was loaned directly from Hokkien, from Malay, from English, or from elsewhere.)
The TEA-CHAI maps and commentaries deal with their blind spots by assuming that there’s nothing to know there anyway. This is esp. no-good b/c much of what’s there is facing erasure in our time — not just eradication, but a guided forgetting that there was ever even anything there besides some Timeless National Chinese Culture, which of course is painstakingly built on the back of such erasures.
This also relates to the surprising shallowness of English-language sources — and I’m not sure E-SE Asian-language sources do much better — when it comes to the origins & early history of tea. The etymology of TEA words near the geographic origin of tea could probably tell us a few things we don’t know, or didn’t know we knew.
Chris Button said,
June 28, 2025 @ 5:36 pm
I agree that the original word for "tea", represented by 茶, did not have a medial -r-. The same word is represented by 荼, which reconstructs as Old Chinese láɰ.
However, 茶 and 荼 developed slightly differently. And 茶 evolved as if it did have a medial -r-, which is presumably what lies behind the Vietnamese reflex.
Yet a peculiar lr- onset is not possible in Old Chinese for phonotactic reasons. I symbolize the distinction as 荼 láɰ vs 茶 lɑ́ɰ and treat the a~ɑ alternation as lengthening with concomitant backing (compare BrE vs AmE pronunciations of words like grass). For the phonetics/phonology, take a look at the analogical conditioning environment discussed in Pulleyblank (1995) "The role of glottal stop in Old Chinese".
Jonathan Smith said,
June 28, 2025 @ 10:47 pm
'Tea' was of course not "Old Chinese", and AFAIK no item reflecting "MC" ≈"du" 荼 appears in the colloquial strata of modern Chinese languages… so to the extent ≈"ɖa" and ≈"du" were things, they were Han-period doublets, separate borrowings from the SEA language(s) in which 'tea' first appeared.
By the way, in my post above, I had earlier pointed out that the history of Min is treated crudely in the posted video — specifically, re: 'tea', it appears that early Min featured a category /ɖ-/ (ish) contrasting with /d-/ — so the item in question would have closely resembled (however "directly") the modern (some) Vietnamese value.
KIRINPUTRA said,
June 29, 2025 @ 1:07 am
@ Jongseong Park
I remember going to internet cafes in Vietnam back in the day and having to ask the attendants to enable 倉頡 input so I could type 漢字. I didn’t want to ask for tiếng Trung ( = 中語), and nobody understood Hán ngữ (漢語). One time I said tiếng Hán ( = 漢語; nobody says this, BTW), and sat down to find that the guy had sensibly set up Korean (tiếng Hàn) input for me: Tiếng Hán didn’t exist, so he figured I was trying to say tiếng Hàn.
As I later learned, “漢語” is not an ancient usage, nor is Hàn-gí much of a word in Taiwanese. It’s not heard, and an older person (having “earned the right to be rude”) in a casual setting might stop the talker to question the word. So it only shows up in contexts where (cultural) Chinese nationalism possesses some kind of gatekeeping function.
@ bks
Thank you! This is great. Didn’t know this site existed.
Re: “clearly spoken” Taioanese, all things considered, the ideal format might be where a broadcaster or show host speaks to the audience (or one interviewee, or two show hosts to each other), on a TV channel or radio station that transmits in Taioanese full-time.
The stealth issue is that — for depressing structural reasons — much of the Taioanese programming you find on more mainstream platforms now (post-c. 2010) is of poor quality with regards to the Taioanese spoken, in relation to how the language is generally (still) spoken. Even in the thoughtfully-made videos reposted here, note the pervasive Mandarin cadence — not a feature of Taioanese in general, even in 2025.
Best bet might be the much-maligned old folks’ radio stations & cable channels, although the content can be hit or miss. I’ll see if I can find some working links to share here before comments close.
Chris Button said,
June 29, 2025 @ 7:11 am
Regarding 茶 / 荼 and the emergence of "tea" from "bitter leaf", Adam Smith shared some insightful comments on LLog a few years ago.
The whole post is worth reading, but here are a couple of snippets on the alternation:
And as Victor Mair concludes:
Chris Button said,
June 29, 2025 @ 7:29 am
So what we have is an original Old Chinese *láɰ (no medial -r-) developing a variant form *lɑ́ɰ (or láːɰ).
Incidentally, the velar coda -ɰ is critical for the velar coda elsewhere in the region, such as in Burmese *lakpʰak "tea leaf" (modern [ləpʰɛʔ]).
So putative Old Chinese reconstructions like *lra are quite off the mark since they add a phonetically unlikely rhotic medial after a lateral onset and omit any velar coda.
Jonathan Smith said,
June 30, 2025 @ 5:18 pm
Quoting from a Reddit comment on India's vernaculars, there is an "obvious mild stigma" associated with Taiwanese in Taiwan (& of course all vernaculars in China) such that it is avoided in any remotely — including indirect or merely psychic — public-facing context, Catch-22 being that educational materials kinda need to public-face. So to some extent one has to get comfortable with contrived situations and materials — it helps to remember that contriving is after all much harder work than being spontaneous. Re: natural language, best I know of is 鳥來伯與十三姨, old TV show some of which is on Youtube — OK not truly spontaneous interaction but, because (I assume?) not conventionally scripted given Taiwanese Orthographical Situation, often gets close and is both linguistically rich and chronologically modern in a way newer TV can't really approach…