Among the English terms borrowed from the Chinese language are several containing dai and tai, dialect forms of ta which means ‘great’ or ‘big’ in standard Chinese.

Tycoon 名 大君

Tycoon, borrowed through its Japanese form, taikun, itself borrowed from Chinese = ta ‘great’ + kian ‘prince’, with the adoptive meaning of ‘great prince of commerce,’ that is, ‘wealthy merchant.’

A ‘banana typhoon’ bends palm trees on the island of Palau.

Typhoon 近义词

A cumbrous jumble of tongues contribute, in a sort of historical glossolalic vortex, to our word typhoon.

The chief influence is the Cantonese word tai-fung, for standard Chinese ta fêng ‘big wind.’

But appearing earlier in print is the Urdu tufan ‘a violent tempest of wind and rain,’ a word signifying the typhoons of India and summer storms on the China Sea. Since Urdu borrowed words from Persian and Arabic, some etymologists suggest tufan arises from an Arabic noun like tawafan ‘violent twisting or whirling’ from the verbal root tafa ‘turn around.’

But Persian, Arabic and Urdu forms could all be borrowings from the name of a much earlier Greek wind monster, Typhon (too-FOON), a primitive Greek god of the winds.

 

Tai Chi (Ch’uan) 太極拳

Tai Cantonese ‘great’ ‘extreme’ + ji ‘limit’ ‘source’ + ch’uan Cantonese for Chinese quan ‘fist.’

This Chinese martial arts-like system of calisthenics combines physical power with internal meditative power. Legend says tai chi arose in the Sung dynasty (960 - 1279 CE), invented by a priest.

A Japanese actor playing a daimyo, in black cap, occupies centre stage.

Daimyo 大名

Daimyo = dai (tai, ta) ‘great’ + myo (mio) ‘name’

This is technically a Japanese word encountered in reading the history of Japan. But since it is a direct borrowing from Chinese and includes our word for ‘great,’ I toss it in here, as they say in New Orleans, for verbal lagniappe.

Daimyo was an honorific title of the warlord rulers of feudal Japanese clans, used for 1,000 years until early in the nineteenth century. One of these booty-rich daimyos often became shogun, supreme military commander of Japan.

TEA

Tea 茶

One Chinese word has winged its way around our green-blue sphere and entered almost every language spoken on earth, and that is one or another version of the Chinese word for tea. As we sip the amber steepings of our teapot, whether it be an exquisite YiXing pot fired of true China clay or a plain Brown Betty teapot of Bradell Woods clay near Stoke-on-Trent in England — such as the stubby BB sitting on my kitchen table in Dunnville, Ontario, Canada — few of us know that we are sipping an infusion of camellia leaves.

The common tea plant is Camellia sinensis ‘Chinese camellia.’

The best etymological note on the origin of the word tea is from The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989:

[= F. thé, Sp. te, It. tè, Du. and Ger. thee, Da., Sw. te, mod.L. thea; ad. (perh. through Malay te, teh) Chinese, Amoy dialect te, in Fuchau tiä = Mandarin ch'a (in ancient Chinese prob. kia); whence Pg. and obs. Sp. cha, obs. It. cià, Russian cha, Pers., Urdu ch (10th c.), Arab. shy, Turkish chy. The Portuguese brought the form cha (which is Cantonese as well as Mandarin) from Macao . This form also passed overland into Russia . The form te (thé) was brought into Europe by the Dutch, prob. from the Malay at Bantam (if not from Formosa , where the Fuhkien or Amoy form was used). The original English pronunciation (te), sometimes indicated by spelling tay, is found in rimes down to 1762, and remains in many dialects; but the current (ti) is found already in the 17th c., shown in rimes and by the spelling tee.]

Island Beauty Hibiscus Teapot

 

茶 World Words for Tea (from Wikipedia)

The Chinese character for tea is 茶 , but it is pronounced differently in the various Chinese dialects. Two pronunciations have made their way into other languages around the world. One is tê, which comes from the Amoy Min Nan dialect, spoken around the port of Xiamen ( Amoy ). This pronunciation is believed to come from the old words for tea 梌 (tú) or 荼 (tú). The other is chá, used by the Cantonese dialect spoken around the ports of Guangzhou (Canton), Hong Kong, Macau, and in overseas Chinese communities, as well as in the Mandarin dialect of northern China. This term was used in ancient times to describe the first flush harvest of tea. Yet another different pronunciation is zu, used in the Wu dialect spoken around Shanghai.

The derivatives from tê

Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name
Afrikaans	tee	Armenian, Catalan	te	Czech	té or thé (1)	Danish	te	Dutch	thee
English	tea	Esperanto	teo	Estonian	tee	Faroese	te	Finnish	tee
French	thé	West Frisian	tee	Galician	té	German	Tee	Hebrew	תה , te
Hungarian	tea	Icelandic	te	Indonesian	teh	Irish	tae	Italian	tè
Javanese	tèh	scientific Latin	thea	Latvian	tēja	Lithuanian	arbata (2)	Low Saxon	Tee or Tei
Malay	teh	Norwegian	te	Occitan	tè	Polish	herbata (3)	Sesotho	tea
Scots Gaelic	tì , teatha	Singhalese	thé	Spanish	té	Scots	tea	Sudanese	entèh
Swedish	te	Tamil	தேநீர thenīr	Telugu	తేనీళ్ళు tēnīru	Welsh	te	Yiddish	טיי , tei

• Note: (1)té or thé, but these words sound archaic; čaj is used nowadays, as explained in the next table. see (4). In case of (2), (3), arbata and herbata are from Late Latin herba thea.

The derivatives from cha or chai

Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name
Albanian	çaj	Amharic	pronounced shy	Arabic	شاي shai	Assyrian	pronounced chai	Azeri	çay
Bengali	চা " cha"	Bosnian	čaj	Bulgarian	чай chai	Capampangan	cha	Cebuano	tsa
Croatian	čaj	Czech	čaj (4)	English	char, slang	Georgian	ჩაი , chai	Greek	τσάι tsái
Gujarati	ચા cha	Hindi	चाय chai	Javanese	tèh	Japanese	茶 , ちゃ , cha	Kannada	Chaha
Kazakh	шай shai	Konkani language	cha	Korean	茶 , 차 cha	Macedonian	чај, čaj	Malayalam	"chaya"
Marathi	चहा chahaa	Mongolian	цай, tsai	Nepali	cheeya	Oriya	cha	Persian	چای chaay
Punjabi	ਚਾਹ	Portuguese	chá	Romanian	ceai	Russian	чай, chai	Serbian	чај, čaj
Slovak	čaj	Slovene	čaj	Somali	shaah	Swahili	chai	Tagalog	tsaa
Thai	ชา , cha	Tibetan	ja	Tlingit	cháayu	Turkish	çay	Ukrainian	чай chai
Urdu	چاى	Uzbek	choy	Vietnamese	*trà and chè (5)

          

 A YiXing teapot (pronounced yee-shing) is the essential tea-brewer’s tool, made of the famous purply-red zisha clay found only in the Jiangsu province of China. Legend says that a Ming dynasty (1368-1644 CE) cook, Gong Chun, invented the teapot method of infusing tea leaves.

 

Steep and sip that, in this Year of the Rat, wordlovers all.

 

© 2007 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

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