NODE / 0230attestedXiamen Min Chinese
茶
TRANSLITERATION tê / dé
tea
- DATE
- Southern Min, attested in modern descriptions
- SENSE
- tea beverage
- FAMILY
- Sino-Tibetan / Sinitic
- CANONICAL KEY
- node:24:te:attested:sense:tea-beverage
WALS gives Min Nan forms such as te55; Merriam-Webster writes the Xiamen donor form dé. The difference is transliteration and variety, not a second lexeme.
01ANCESTRAL EDGES
ROOT OF THIS ROOT
GO DEEPERsinitic reflexprobable
Old Chinese (reconstructed) · Old Chinese reconstruction · tea beverage*lˤra
name of a plant
- SOUND
- Southern Min te is treated as a divergent Sinitic reflex of the word reconstructed by Baxter and Sagart as Old Chinese *lˤra; the exact sound history is not reduced here to one uncontroversial rule.
- MEANING
- The plant or beverage meaning remains tea.
- CHRONOLOGY
- Old Chinese reconstruction to the historically documented Southern Min form.
- SCHOLAR
- Östen Dahl · William H. Baxter · Laurent Sagart
- CONFIDENCE
- probable — WALS establishes the Min Nan te family; Baxter and Sagart establish the reviewed Old Chinese reconstruction. The Min branch is not falsely routed through the later Middle Chinese *drae reading.
02DIRECT DESCENDANT EDGES
THE NEXT HISTORICAL STEP
DESCENDANTborrowingestablished
Dutch · 17th century–today · tea beveragethee
tea
- SOUND
- Dutch thee adapts the Southern Min te-type pronunciation with Dutch spelling conventions.
- MEANING
- The meaning remains tea.
- CHRONOLOGY
- Dutch commercial contact with Xiamen and wider Asian maritime trade intensified in the seventeenth century.
- SCHOLAR
- Östen Dahl
- CONFIDENCE
- established — WALS explicitly connects Dutch contacts at Amoy/Xiamen with Dutch thee.
03TRANSITIVE DESCENDANT CLOSURE
EVERY REVIEWED BRANCH FROM HERE
This is the complete downstream closure currently supported by the canonical graph. Every displayed step is a real reviewed edge with its own sound claim, meaning claim, scholar, confidence, and citations.
- UNIQUE DESCENDANT NODES
- 2
- REVIEWED EDGES
- 2
- DEEPEST PATH
- 2
- MODERN DOSSIERS REACHED
- 1
HISTORICAL STEP 011 EDGE
STEP 01borrowingestablished
- SOUND
- Dutch thee adapts the Southern Min te-type pronunciation with Dutch spelling conventions.
- MEANING
- The meaning remains tea.
HISTORICAL STEP 021 EDGE
STEP 02borrowingprobable
- SOUND
- English tea reflects the Dutch thee-type form; the modern /iː/ follows the wider English raising of earlier /eː/.
- MEANING
- The plant and beverage senses were retained, then English developed additional meal, social-event, infusion, and slang branches.
“Every” means every descendant in the reviewed SET-U graph. It does not convert missing scholarship or missing ingestion into a claim of historical completeness. The coverage ledger remains the honest denominator.
04RECORDED EVIDENCE
ATTESTATIONS / FIRST KNOWN USE
NO RECORDED WITNESS ATTACHED.The reviewed graph does not yet attach a source-reported or directly inspected witness to this canonical form.
05EDITORIAL REUSE
WORD DOSSIERS USING THIS NODE