'Tea' or 'chai'? Why we misspeak. Fellatone.
Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers.
Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1012. Most words are different in different languages, but water from steeped leaves has only two main names: tea and chai. We look at why! Also, if you've ever mixed up words, like calling a butterfly a "flutterby," you'll love learning about what these slips of the tongue tell us about how we form sentences.
The "tea" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
The "slips of the tongue" segment was written by Cecile McKee, , a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
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References for the "tea" segment:
Ceresa, Marco. 2009. Tea: A very Short History. Daniel Leese, ed. Brill’s Encyclopedia of China. Leiden: Brill
Jurafsky, Dan. 2017. Tea. In Sybesma, R. P. E., Wolfgang Behr, Yueguo Gu, Zev J. Handel, Cheng-Teh James Huang, and James Myers, eds. 2017. Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Leiden: Brill.
Tea Definition and Meaning. Merriam-Webster online.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FAO. 2021. A cup of tea…or chai? Available at https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1639559/
Mair, Victor. 2019. Sinographs for “tea”. Language Log post. Available at https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=41281
Östen Dahl. 2013. Tea. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) WALS Online.
Säily, Tanja, Mäkelä, Eetu and Samuli Kaislaniemi. 2019. Cha before tea: finding earlier mentions in a corpus of early English letters (part 1). Oxford English Dictionary Academic Case Studies. Available at
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Grandma Girl here, I'm in Yon Fog, your friendly guide to the English language. |
| 0:10.2 | We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. |
| 0:13.6 | Today's topics are why the world primarily has two different words for tea |
| 0:18.8 | and some fun slips of the tongue. |
| 0:24.7 | There aren't that many words that are said pretty much the same way no matter what language |
| 0:29.4 | you speak. |
| 0:30.8 | Even the bark of a dog sounds different when spoken by an English speaker, |
| 0:34.4 | woof woof, versus a Japanese speaker wan won. But one word that's similar |
| 0:40.4 | across many languages might surprise you, It's the word for tea. Now it might |
| 0:46.3 | seem a bit odd for something we drink to be the word heard round the world, but the reason |
| 0:51.5 | behind this linguistic beverage Kumbaya is linked to where tea was |
| 0:56.2 | first cultivated and how it became a hot ticket trade item. |
| 1:01.1 | Even more fun, the two main pronunciations we find shared by many languages to say |
| 1:05.1 | tea today can be traced to whether tea travelled by land or by sea. |
| 1:11.0 | So let's start at the beginning of tea's journey. The plant providing the leaves from which |
| 1:16.3 | tea is brewed is known as Camilia Sinasis and it grew wildly in areas like India and China. |
| 1:24.0 | Around the 3rd century, |
| 1:26.0 | it's thought to have been cultivated for drinking by the Chinese, |
| 1:30.0 | though a Chinese legend suggests it was discovered as early as 2737 b.C. when a stray tea leaf inadvertently |
| 1:38.8 | blew into the boiled water being prepared for an emperor named Shenang. Needless to say, the emperor was pleased with the result. |
| 1:48.0 | Though tea leaves seemed to have been used mainly as a steeped medicinal herb before the 8th century. It was the publication of a book on tea culture by Chinese monk and tea aficionado Lou Yu around 760 CE that really skyrocketed its popularity and made tea drinking the thing to do. |
| 2:08.0 | Whether or not the discovery of its brewing potential was accidental, |
... |
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