 Camelia sinensis |
It occurred to me a few days ago that the words for tea in various languages fall into two groups: those that begin with a plosive and those that begin with an affricate. Presumably, they all derive ultimately from the Chinese word 茶 which in Putonghua is pronounced [ʈʂʰá].
Your faithful blogger has investigated and it appears that the plosive words (English, French, German, Italian etc.) derive from the variety of Chinese spoken in Fujian where the word is pronounced [te] (I don’t know about the tone). The affricate words (Russian, Portuguese, Turkish etc.) derive from the Cantonese pronunciation, which as far as I can gather is the same as that for Putonghua.
Korean has two readings for the Chinese character è?¶, ‘da’ ë?¤ /dÌ¥a/ and ‘cha’ ì°¨ /tÉ?Ê°a/. ‘Cha’ is the normal Korean word for tea and is also used for the names of specific teas and tisanes such as ‘hongcha’ (red tea) and ‘boricha’ (barley tea). ‘Da’ is not used by itself but is the reading used in some compounds like ‘dabang’ (tea shop) and ‘dagwa’ (refreshments, literally ‘tea and cake’).
This is unusual because the vast majority of Chinese characters used in Korean have only a single reading, unlike the situation in Japanese.