820 canonical forms + 578 route stages.
THE TIMELINE ATLAS
JOURNEY ATLAS ↗FORM / ROUTE / BOUND
1398 REVIEWED EVENTSLANGUAGE
IN TIME.
One cross-word chronology for every defensibly bounded form and journey stage—without converting a vague historical label into a fake year.
A reviewed graph bound, not a claim of an earliest human word.
Only stages with directly cited numeric bounds enter this atlas.
Labels remain visible in Journey Atlas, but not parsed into false years.
002 MATCHING EVENTS
FILTER THE CHRONOLOGY
WHEN DID THE EVIDENCE LAND?
TWO CLOCKS.
NO FALSE PRECISION.
FORM CHRONOLOGY dates a canonical linguistic form or reconstruction in the lexical graph.
ROUTE CHRONOLOGY dates a geographic or transmission stage in a word’s journey.
They can share an era band, but they are never silently treated as the same kind of claim.
CROSS-WORD CHRONOLOGY / EARLIEST BOUND FIRST
THE EVIDENCE IN TIME
Early modern1 ON THIS PAGE
1500 CE–1599 CEcentury
ROUTE STAGEMacao and Cantonese maritime contact
chá
16th century
WALS links Portuguese chá to Cantonese cha through Portuguese import activity at Macao.
1 EVIDENCE LINK
The century describes the historically reported contact route, not one dated borrowing token.
AUDIT RECORD ↗Modern1 ON THIS PAGE
2026 CE →open
ROUTE STAGEPortuguese-language record
chá
current Infopédia record
The living Portuguese headword preserves the cha-type form and /ʃ/ pronunciation.
2 EVIDENCE LINKS
2026 identifies the consulted online record, not the beginning of Portuguese chá.
AUDIT RECORD ↗UNBOUNDED IS
A REAL RESULT.
Stages without source-backed numeric bounds stay in their complete Journey Atlas route, carry an explicit temporal note, and remain absent here until the evidence supports normalization. The missing point is visible work—not permission to guess.