Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers. 'Tea' or 'chai'? Why we misspeak. Fellatone.
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
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