Episode 1 - Tea

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I don’t know if you’ve heard of Long John Baldry but he was a musician who palled around with Elton John and Rod Stewart.

One of Long John’s songs is Everything Stops for Tea. Therein he claims

Every nation in creation has its favorite drink
France is famous for its wine, it’s beer in Germany
Turkey has its coffee and they serve it blacker than ink
Russians go for vodka and England loves its tea

Oh, the factory may be roaring
With a boom-a-lacka, zoom-a-lacka, wee
But there isn’t any roar when the clock strikes four
Everything stops for tea

This little ditty feeds off of and reinforces the image of a cup of tea being a very British thing to enjoy.

Long John says it’s coffee in Turkey but you might be surprised to learn that people were drinking coffee in England for quite a while before anyone there had ever heard of tea.

Actually both coffee and tea show up in the written record in the same year—1598—and in the same document, but tea came out as chaa and didn’t turn up again as tea until 1655, forty years after that other English icon—Shakespeare—was six feet under.

That document was something called John Huighen Van Linschoten, his Discours of Voyages into the East and West Indies.

John Huighen Van Linschoten was Dutch and the Dutch were big into sailing around discovering things and then becoming middlemen selling those things here and there around the world.

And so it was that Dutch traders to Malay or Formosa brought back the Amoy dialect word tea to Europe—or something like tea—while Mandarin Chinese chai found its way to Europe courtesy of Portuguese traders; Arabs via the silk route; and overland to Russia.

Tea drinking in England took a while to get going. It was 1660 when Samuel Pepys reported tasting the stuff for the first time.

So tea changed its pronunciation back in the Far East before Europeans discovered it and it’s also a good example of how pronunciation change continues. While Long John Baldry rhymed tea with wee and Germany, The American Heritage Dictionary offers up a passage by Alexander Pope that shows the pronunciation of tea back in 1714 as “tay,” rhyming with obey.