Tsiosophy

Cha and Te

The character 茶 for tea was pronounced differently in different Chinese dialects.  Seafaring merchants sailing from their native ports in southern China spoke a number of local and regional languages, including the widely disparate Cantonese of Guangdong province and the Amoy of Fujian.  While trading in Southeast Asian waters, along the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Java, the Chinese encountered early European traders at the port cities of Malacca, Bantam, and Jayakarta and introduced the Westerners to tea.  When speaking of the plant and leaf, the Chinese used the distinct languages of their different provinces.

Cha

The Cantonese pronounced the word tea as cha.[1] Cha also happened to be the spoken word for tea in the widespread Mandarin dialect.  Linguistically, Cantonese and Mandarin together covered nearly three quarters of the country, that is to say, cha was the dominant pronunciation for tea throughout China.  Tea as 茶 and cha extended beyond the continent to Korea and Japan, where the plant and herb were introduced from China as an important commodity and a feature of high culture and foreign diplomacy. Continue Reading →

02. June 2011 by Steven D. Owyoung
Categories: History |

Tsia and Cha

Before the English term “tea,” the words “tsia,” “tcha,” and “chia” were all early Western attempts to replicate cha, the Chinese pronunciation of the written character 茶 meaning  tea.[1] As the first Europeans to sail to China in 1513, the Portuguese were also the first to hear the word cha 茶 spoken in Chinese at Macao and other Asian ports of call.

Cha

Thirty years later, they landed in Japan and heard the similar name cha 茶 in Japanese at the port of Hirado.  To represent the Asian words for tea, Portuguese mariners and merchants engaged in phonetic substitution and used the Latin alphabet to reproduce the sound.  Thereafter, the Romanized word “cha” generally sufficed for early written reports about the herb to Lisbon. But there was a problem.  In the early sixteenth century, there was little consensus as to the spelling of ordinary European words let alone foreign names like cha and tea.  Among Lusitanian writers, the spelling of foreign words was a matter of personal choice or style or phonetics.  In the case of tea, the Benedictine monk Gaspar da Cruz italicized and spelled it “ch’a”[2] and the Jesuit Luis d’Almeida wrote it as “chia,”[3] while the adventurer Fernão Mendes Pinto chose the unitalicized “cha” sans apostrophe.[4] Initially influenced by reports from Lisbon and Rome, other Europeans later began to adopt Chinese and Japanese words in their vernaculars.  Lacking their own rules of spelling, however, the rest of Europe struggled to represent cha in their respective languages.[5]

Among English and French writers of the seventeenth century, cha was written “tcha.”[6] German writers were indiscriminate, one giving tea six names at different points in his description, including ”tsia,” “tzai,” and “cha.”[7] And in a single study of the plant, a German physician referred to tea as “tsia,” “tsja,” “tsjaa,” “ta,” and “sa,” among other names.[8] Compounding the Western chaos over spelling, there was the added confusion of tea having more than one Chinese name.  Europeans learned that cha 茶 was also pronounced te 茶.

Notes

30. May 2011 by Steven D. Owyoung
Categories: History |

Tsiology and the OED

The term “tsiology” was introduced in the book title Tsiology; A Discourse on Tea in 1826.  For over one hundred years, the word remained obscure until 1933 when it was included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

According to the OED , “tsiology” was derived from the obsolete root word “tsia” meaning tea.  The lexicon did not include a phonetic transcription but noted that “tsia” was pronounced like the words “tcha” and “chia.”[1] The dictionary further observed that “chia” was “an early form of the word TEA”[2] and moreover that “chia” was once introduced into the English language but no longer survived in general use.  Obsolescence of all three terms “tsia,” “tcha,” and “chia” further confused the matter.

James Murray

James Murray and the other editors of the OED dubbed “tsiology” an ad hoc or nonce word.[3] As a nonce word, “tsiology” was a figure of speech created to meet a need that was not expected to recur, and so it was used just “for the nonce” as the leading title of A Discourse on Tea.  Strictly speaking, “tsiology” was a hapax legomenon, a unique word that occurs only once in a single work.[4] More accurate still, “tsiology” was a neologism, a term minted to extend the meaning of the existing word – “ology” – by combining it with the unique prefix “tsi,” the contraction of  “tsia.”  “Hence,” as the Dictionary intoned, “Tsiology, a scientific dissertation on tea.”[5]

Notes

26. May 2011 by Steven D. Owyoung
Categories: History |

Tsiology

In 1826, a small book was published in London bearing the curious name Tsiology; A Discourse on Tea.  Like many previous treatises written in Europe, Discourse dealt with the nature of the exotic Asian plant Camellia sinensis and its leaf.  Yet, no title on the subject of tea was ever so strange as Tsiology.

Tsiology; A Discourse on Tea

Lengthy subtitles provided the content of the book: “being an Account of that Exotic; Botanical, Chymical, Commercial, & Medical, with notices of its adulteration, the means of detection, Tea Making, with a brief history of The East India Company, etc.”[1] But the word “tsiology” was still difficult to fathom, and parsing the term merely hinted at a special branch of knowledge or science.

“Tsiology” defied discovery in the dictionaries of the day, but its exclusion from the English lexicon was easily explained: the word was pure invention.  Expressly coined for the book, “tsiology” appeared just once in the title and not at all in the text,[2] leaving the origin and true meaning of the term a profound mystery.  That the author, “A Tea Dealer,” remained cloaked in anonymity further muddled the matter.

Nonetheless, Tsiology briefly intrigued London readers with its veneer of erudition, the novel work and title lasting through three editions printed over a year or so.[3] Although the book dealt with several important and timely issues of the British tea trade, “tsiology” never gained popularity as an expression of tea, and indeed it all but disappeared from the common English language.

Notes

[1] The full title of the book read Tsiology; A Discourse on Tea, being an Account of that Exotic; Botanical, Chymical, Commercial, & Medical, with notices of its adulteration, the means of detection, Tea Making, with a brief history of The East India Company, etc. For a list of early books on tea, see John Coakley Lettsom (English, 1744–1815), The Natural History of the Tea-Tree (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1772), pp. 8-12.

25. May 2011 by Steven D. Owyoung
Categories: History |