The journey of tea

The other day, when I was bored, I decided to take up yet another language – Turkish. If you’re thinking whether the rest of my languages is so good that I can take up another one, the answer is definitely not, I should be absolutely focusing on my Japanese while I’m here.

So anyway, I took up Turkish and, as it is so different from any other language I can speak, I’ve been struggling with the vocabulary a little bit (“pasta” means a cake, c’mon!), until I came across the word “çay“ [chai; čaj]. This got me thinking about etymology and history. Where did tea, or rather, Slovak čaj, come from? And why is the Turkish word same as the Slovak one, yet most European languages I can think of have a word similar to the English one?

So I looked into it and I’ll try to present my process of finding the answers. Just a little disclaimer here, this is not an obscure linguistic question that I solved as the first human being in the world. After a few moments of googling, you can find quite a lot about it, but I found it interesting and wanted to share it on my little corner of the internet. ♥

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What I’d known even before I started even thinking about this, is that tea comes from China and that in Chinese it is “茶” (where Japanese got it from). It is pronounced [cha], which is already very similar to the Turkish and Slovak one. So the first thing that came to my mind was the fact that there was Osman empire right next to today’s Slovakia and there are some words that we started using during this period and due to the Osman influence. Also, tea seems to be an important part of the culture, so maybe, perhaps, possibly they got it from India that got the tea from China?

Then I looked into my amazing Etymological dictionary, which only perplexed me more. It said that it comes from Russian “чай” [chai]. What do they mean from Russian? How is that possible when in Polish, it is “herbata”?! Also, it seems that in the past, in Slovakia, we also used something similar to the polish word for the tea, “herba-té”. Why does it have té in it?? But I was right in one thing, the Russians got it from Turkish, from Indian, from Chinese…

So then I started googling for real! And despite being the grand language detective I am, I overlooked one minor detail – the number of dialects/languages in China. I found out that “cha” comes actually from Cantonese and is used in the countries where it travelled by land. On the other hand, “tê” comes from Amoy dialect and from this area, the product travelled by sea. And to explain the “herba-té” thing, well, “herba” in Latin means a plant, so “herba te” means a tea plant, which is where the word derives from according to certain beliefs.

茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶茶

Then I also looked up the origin of the word sugar, because the Turkish word was also notably similar to the Slovak one, but again, I was met with a disappointment in my deductive skills. Sugar originally comes from Chinese too, but the form we know and use nowadays comes from India. Then it travelled to the Arabic world and Arabs brought it to Spain during the invasion, to France, to Germany and from there it probably got to Slovakia. But who knows, maybe in reality we didn’t understand “der Zucker”, only “şeker” [sheker]. Either way, the history and languages are really cool.

Conclusion: No matter how you say tea in your language, it most definitely comes from the Chinese word 茶. Surprised? Not really. Fascinated? Very much.