Professor George van Driem (University of Bern): Tea by any other name... and some highlights of tea history.
The English say tea, and the French say thé, but which of the two is more original? In Mandarin, tea is called chá 茶, but at the end of the 8th century this character does not yet occur as such in Chinese sources. What did Chinese tú 荼 originally mean? How about the characters , or ? In Urdu, the word for tea is cāy چائے …to which Russian čai ̯чай ‘tea’ would appear to be related. Whereas Nepalis say ciyā िचया, Gujaratis say cā ચા and Tibetans will write ཇ་ , which is pronounced either as [ʨʰɑ̱] or [ʨɑ̱], depending on which particular part of the high plateau he happens to hail from. The Sinhalese word for tea is te ෙ", but how to explain Tamil tē yilai ேத#ைல or Khmer tɨk tae ទឹកែត, let alone Polish herbata? Tracing the provenance of the names for tea reveals a tangled web intricately tied to the history of the globalisation of the cultigen Camellia sinensis. All is told in detail in the new 2½ kg volume The Tale of Tea, and a tip of the veil will be lifted for the Fellows in residence, woven into a telling of some salient moments of tea history. The author has begun writing yet another book on tea, which, however, will be smaller and geographically narrower in scope. He will also briefly discuss this new ongoing research.