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Tea is an aromatic beverage commonly prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured leaves of the ''Camellia sinensis'', an evergreen shrub native to Asia.〔Martin, p. 8〕 After water, it is the most widely consumed drink in the world. There are many different types of tea; some teas, like Darjeeling and Chinese greens, have a cooling, slightly bitter, and astringent flavour, while others have vastly different profiles that include sweet, nutty, floral, or grassy notes. Tea originated in the southwest of China, used as a medicinal drink.〔 It became a popular drink throughout China during the Tang dynasty, and tea drinking spread to other East Asian countries. Portuguese priests and merchants introduced it to the West during the 16th century.〔 During the 17th century, drinking tea became fashionable among Britons, who started large-scale production and commercialization of the plant in India to bypass a Chinese monopoly at that time.〔http://www.teamuse.com/article_000803.html〕 The phrase herbal tea usually refers to infusions of fruit or herbs made without the tea plant, such as steeps of rosehip, chamomile, or rooibos. These are also known as ''tisanes'' or ''herbal infusions'' to distinguish them from "tea" as it is commonly construed. == Etymology == (詳細はChinese character for tea is 茶, originally written with an extra stroke as 荼 (pronounced ''tu'', used as a word for a bitter herb), and acquired its current form during the Tang Dynasty as used in the eighth-century treatise on tea, ''The Classic of Tea''. The word is pronounced differently in the different varieties of Chinese, such as ''chá'' in Mandarin, ''zo'' and ''dzo'' in Wu Chinese, and ''ta'' and ''te'' in Min Chinese. One suggestion is that the different pronunciations may have arisen from the different words for tea in ancient China, for example ''tu'' (荼) may have given rise to ''tê''; historical phonologists however argued that the ''cha'', ''te'' and ''dzo'' all arose from the same root with a reconstructed pronunciation ''dra'' (''dr''- represents a single consonant for a retroflex ''d''), which changed due to sound shift through the centuries. Other ancient words for tea include ''jia'' (檟, defined as "bitter ''tu''" during the Han Dynasty), ''she'' (蔎), ''ming'' (茗) and ''chuan'' (荈), with ''ming'' the only other word still in common use for tea. It has been proposed that the Chinese words for tea, ''tu'', ''cha'' and ''ming'', may have been borrowed from the Austro-Asiatic languages of people who inhabited southwest China; ''cha'' for example may have been derived from an archaic Austro-Asiatic root *''la'', meaning "leaf". Most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce it along the lines of ''cha'', but Hokkien varieties along the Southern coast of China and in Southeast Asia pronounce it like ''teh''. These two pronunciations have made their separate ways into other languages around the world: * Te is from the Amoy ''tê'' of southern Fujian province. It reached the West from the port of Xiamen (Amoy), once a major point of contact with Western European traders such as the Dutch, who spread it to Western Europe. This pronunciation gives rise to English "tea" and other similar words in other languages, and is the most common form worldwide. * Cha is from the Cantonese ''chàh'' of Guangzhou (Canton) and the ports of Hong Kong and Macau, also major points of contact, especially with the Portuguese, who spread it to India in the 16th century. The Korean and Japanese pronunciations of ''cha'', however, came not from Cantonese, rather they were borrowed into Korean and Japanese during earlier periods of Chinese history. A third form, the increasingly widespread ''chai'' came from Persian چای ''chay''. Both the ''châ'' and ''chây'' forms are found in Persian dictionaries. They derive from Northern Chinese pronunciation of ''chá'',〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Chai )〕 which passed overland to Central Asia and Persia, where it picked up the Persian grammatical suffix ''-yi'' before passing on to Russian, Arabic, Urdu, Turkish, etc.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=tea )〕 The few exceptions of words for tea that do not fall into the three broad groups of ''te'', ''cha'' and ''chai'' are mostly from the minor languages from the botanical homeland of the tea plant from which the Chinese words for tea might have been borrowed originally. English has all three forms: ''cha'' or ''char'' (both pronounced ), attested from the 16th century; ''tea'', from the 17th; and ''chai'', from the 20th. Languages in more intense contact with Chinese, Sinospheric languages such as Vietnamese, Zhuang, Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese, may have borrowed their words for tea at an earlier time and from a different variety of Chinese, so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Although normally pronounced as ''cha'', Japanese also retains the early but now uncommon pronunciations of ''ta'' and ''da'', similarly Korean also has ''ta'' in addition to ''cha'', and Vietnamese ''trà'' in addition to ''chà''. Japanese has different pronunciations for the word tea depending on when the pronunciations were first borrowed into the language: ''Ta'' comes from the Tang Dynasty court at Chang'an—that is, from Middle Chinese; ''da'', however, comes from the earlier Southern Dynasties court at Nanjing, a place where the consonant was still voiced, as it is today in neighbouring Shanghainese ''zo''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「tea」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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