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.
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
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today's topics are why the world primarily has two different words for tea and some fun slips of the tongue.
by Valerie Fridland
There aren't that many words that are said pretty much the same way no matter what language you speak. Even the bark of a dog sounds different when spoken by an English speaker (woof woof) versus a Japanese speaker (wan wan). But one word that is similar across many languages might surprise you: It’s the word for “tea.”
Now it might seem a bit odd for something we drink to be the word heard round the world, but the reason behind this linguistic beverage kumbaya is linked to where tea was first cultivated and how it became a hot ticket trade item. Even more fun, the two main pronunciations we find shared by many languages to say "tea" today can be traced to whether tea traveled by land or by sea.
So, let’s start at the beginning of tea’s journey. The plant providing the leaves from which tea is brewed is known as camellia sinensis, and it grew wildly in areas like India and China. Around the 3rd century CE, it is thought to have been cultivated for drinking by the Chinese, though a Chinese legend suggests it was discovered as early as 2737 BCE when a stray tea leaf inadvertently blew into the boiled water being prepared for an Emperor named Shennong. Needless to say, the Emperor was pleased with the result. Though tea leaves seem 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 Lu Yu around 760 CE that really skyrocketed its popularity and made tea drinking the thing to do.
Whether or not the discovery of its brewing potential was accidental, in early texts, the drinkable form of camellia sinensis was referred to as “tu” which seems to have meant “bitter herb” rather than specifically “tea.” Over time, one character stroke in the written character for “tu” was subtracted, giving rise to a new character to specifically refer to tea. The way people pronounced this character varied by dialect, with the Southern Min variety saying “té” while the Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciation was “cha.”
As tea became popular outside of China, its name traveled with it, but which version of the name depended on the dialect spoken by those who were trading the tea. For areas reachable by land via the famous “Silk Road” trade route, tea arrived mainly from the Northern provinces where the “cha” pronunciation was the norm. As a result, “cha” spread to areas like India, the Middle East, Russia, Turkey and Japan, eventually becoming “chai” in Hindi, ” "çay" in Turkish, “chay” in Russian, “shay” in Arabic and “ocha” in Japanese. This pronunciation even traveled as far as some parts of Africa, ending up as “chai” in Swahili.
In contrast, along the Southern coast of China including the region of Fujian and Taiwan, the word was pronounced as “té,” and it's from these ports that Dutch East India’s trading ships sailed in the 17th century, bringing tea and this “te” pronunciation to much of Western Europe. In Dutch the word became “thee,” in English, “tea,” in French “thé,” and Italian and Spanish “té.” The change in vowel pronunciation in English from “te” (as in ‘tay’) to “ti” (as in ‘tee’) occurred as it underwent the Great Vowel Shift which was just finishing up as tea made its way into British cups. There were an earlier few who called tea “cha” in Western Europe before the main influx of “te” in the 17th century. This early pronunciation came via 16th century Portuguese traders who got their tea from ports in Macao, which was a “cha”-speaking region. But, since the Dutch soon became the main tea importers, “té” variants became dominant across much of Europe. In Malay and Indonesian, the word for tea is the similar sounding “teh” not so much because of trade, but because Southern Min Chinese speakers settled in those parts of Southeast Asia, bringing their word with them.
Though there are a few languages where tea has a different name, it is often because tea was an indigenous plant which had been given another native name. This is the case in the Burmese language where it is called “lahpet,” a word derived from a much earlier version of the ancient word, “la,” from which the Chinese word for "tea" also developed after experiencing substantial sound changes.
As a side note, though many modern Western tea drinkers prefer black tea, for most of its early history, most tea that was imbibed was green tea, though both black, and green tea come from the same plant. Green tea is usually harvested from younger leaves and the green color comes from the natural color of the leaves. Black tea didn't become widely popular until the 19th century, after the British began to cultivate it more cheaply in India, and its black color comes from the oxidation of its leaves.
And now that we are back in the modern era, you might be wondering where the expression “spill the tea,” comes from. Well, we find some uses of the expression “spill the tea leaves” dating back to the 1980s to refer to giving inside or secret information. This sense appears to come from the act of seeing the future in tea leaves, as in a tea leaf reading. However, the popular slang expression, as in “tell me the tea,” or gossip, is less clearly related to tea itself. Instead, it first appears in a quote from Lady Chablis, a drag queen featured in the book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" where she refers to it as the (letter) “T,” standing for either “my truth” or, in some cases, “my thing” (as in things that are hidden).
So that ends our tale of tea. But not without one last tea tip: “Chai” and “tea” are one and the same, so when you're ordering a chai tea at Starbucks, you're technically being redundant. It's fine to just have yourself a chai.
That 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.
This next segment is written by Cecile McKee, a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona.
by Cecile McKee
Have you visited Yew Nork? Does your stummy ache? What dog of bag food will we get?
In case you’ve wondered what causes such speech errors or slips of the tongue, you might like to know that all speakers – of all ages and abilities – make them sometimes. Even people who use a sign language produce what some call “slips of the hand.” Slips are a common feature of language.
As a developmental psycholinguist who studies how people use language, I am interested in what speech errors tell us about the human mind. Research shows that language users store and retrieve different units of language. These include small ones like single consonants, and big ones like phrases made of several words.
One way to think about speech errors is in terms of the linguistic units that each involves. Another way to think about them is in terms of the actions affecting these units.
The “Yew Nork” slip shows consonant sounds switching places – a sound exchange. Notice that each of the consonants is first in its own syllable. The “dog of bag food” slip shows a word exchange. Notice that both words are nouns. Vowel sounds can also switch places, as when a speaker who meant “feed the pooch” said, “food the peach.”
The “stummy” slip blends the synonyms “stomach” and “tummy.” Phrases can also blend, as in “It depends on the day of the mood I’m in.” The speaker who said this had in mind both “the day of the week” and “the mood I’m in,” but with only one mouth for the two messages to pass through, he blended the phrases.
Another way to think about speech errors is in terms of what influences them. Substitutions of one word for another can illustrate.
Someone who meant to refer to fingers said instead, “Don’t burn your toes.” The words “toe” and “finger” don’t sound alike, but they name similar body parts. In fact, Latin used the same word, “digitus,” to refer to digits of the hands and digits of the feet.
This word substitution – and thousands like it – suggests that our mental dictionaries link words with related meanings. In other words, semantic connections can influence speech errors. The speaker here was trying to get the word “finger” from the body-part section of his mental dictionary and slipped over to its semantic neighbor “toe.”
Another type of word substitution reveals something else about our mental dictionaries. Someone who meant to refer to his mustache said instead, “I got whipped cream on my mushroom.” The words “mustache” and “mushroom” sound similar. Each word starts with the same consonant and vowel, denoted as “[mʌ]” in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Each word is two syllables long with stress on the first syllable. But the meanings of these two words are not similar.
This word substitution – and thousands like it – suggests that our mental dictionaries also link words with similar sounds. In other words, phonological connections can influence speech errors. The speaker here was trying to get the word “mustache” from the “[mʌ]” section of his mental dictionary and slipped over to its phonological neighbor “mushroom.”
Psycholinguists who collect and analyze speech errors find many ways to categorize them and to explain how and why people make them.
I like to compare that effort with how Charles Darwin studied Galápagos finches. Studying speech errors and finches in detail reveals how tiny variations distinguish them.
Theories of how people talk seek to explain those details. Psycholinguists distinguish slips by the linguistic units that they involve, such as consonants, vowels, words and phrases. They describe how and when speakers use such information. This can help us understand how language develops in children and how it breaks down in people with certain impairments.
These theories also describe different stages for planning and producing sentences. For example, psycholinguists hypothesize that speakers start with what they want to convey. Then they retrieve word meanings from a mental dictionary. They arrange the words according to the grammar of the language they’re speaking. How words sound and the rhythm of whole sentences are later stages. If this is right, the “finger-toe” substitution reflects an earlier stage than the “mustache-mushroom” substitution.
The study of speech errors reminds us that glitches happen now and then in every complex behavior. When you walk, you sometimes trip. When you talk, you sometimes slip.
That 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.
Finally, I have a familect story.
I have a familect story for you. I grew up with three younger sisters. When we were teenagers, the phone rang a lot.
And when you heard the phone, my dad would say, "It's the fella tone." Also my sister Nancy, when she was little, often dropped things on the floor. When she did, she said she was having a plopper time.
Thanks so much for sharing your story. "Fella tone" instead of "telephone" is the absolutely perfect familect to go with a show about slips of the tongue like "a dog of bag food" and "Yew Nork"!
If you have a familect story to share, I'd love to hear it, and now you can send me a voice memo on WhatsApp. The link is in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect and record your message in a nice quiet place.
Finally, if you're an educator, check out my writing courses on LinkedIn Learning. Let me help you help your students write better.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Holly Hutchings in digital operations, Davina Tomlin and Nat Hoopes in marketing; Morgan Christianson in advertising, Brannan Goetschius, director of podcasts; and Dan Feierabend in audio, who like to screen print his own T-shirts.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty. That's all. Thanks for listening.
The following references for the "tea" segment did not appear in the audio but are included here for completeness.
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 https://www.oed.com/information/using-the-oed/academic-case-studies/the-oed-and-research/cha-before-tea-finding-earlier-mentions-in-a-corpus-of-early-english-letters-part-1/