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. Nitpick might be that the account of the formation of Min (2nd video) is rough-and-ready — but who knows the details there anyway.