Tea if by Sea, Cha if by Land: Why the World Only Has Two Words for Tea
These words, past their initial intrigue, offer us a looking glass into specific cultures. After all, for a culture to come up with a word, something must happen often enough. And for it not to exist in other cultures, it must not have passed that intangible threshold. This very concept means that with untranslatables, we very likely experiencing a... See more
Steph Smith • Gaining Perspective Through Untranslatable Words
If tea spread to your country by sea you call it tea, if it spread by land you call it chai. This is because the ports of Fujian and Taiwan use the coastal pronunciation "te", whereas Mandarin uses "chá" https://t.co/k0rJJFgx4N
Dictionary dump (unformatted): a/an : “A was modified from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing the eagle. In Hebrew it was an ox, and in Greek it was a “symbol of a bad AUGURY in the sacrifices.” The distinction between a/an happened around the 1300s. aardvark : South African “earth pig” aaron’s serpent : “something so powerful as to swallow up
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