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How close each word sounds to yours
Tea in the languages of the map, grouped by words that sound alike:
Finnish tee, North Karelian čäijy, Olonets Karelian čuaju, Veps čai, Estonian tee, Livonian tēj, Lule Sami tedja, Northern Sami deadju, Inari Sami čee, Skolt Sami čee, Kildin Sami чайй, Hill Mari чӓй, Meadow Mari чай, Moksha чай, Erzya чай, Udmurt чай, Komi-Permyak чай, Komi-Zyrian чай, Hungarian tea, Northern Khanty шай, Northern Mansi ся̄й, Northern Selkup чой, Tundra Nenets сяй, Forest Enets чай, Nganasan чаи, Bengali চা, Hindi चाय, Northern Pashto چای, Western Farsi چای, Northern Kurdish çay, Ossetian цай, Armenian թեյ, Standard Albanian çaj, Bulgarian чай, Croatian čaj, Slovene čáj, Slovak čaj, Czech čaj, Ukrainian чай, Belarusian чай, Russian чай, Latvian tēja, Icelandic te, Norwegian (Bokmål) te, Swedish te, Danish te, German Tee, Dutch thee, English tea, Irish tae, Welsh te, Breton te, French thé, Catalan te, Spanish té, Portuguese chá, Italian tè, Romanian ceai, Turkish çay, North Azerbaijani çay, Northern Uzbek choy, Kazakh шай, Bashkir сәй, Tatar чәй, Sakha чэй, Chuvash чей, Khalkha Mongolian цай, Buryat сай, Kalmyk цә, Evenki чай, Manchu cai, Nanai чаи, Northern Yukaghir чай, Itelmen чай, Chukchi чай, Nivkh чай, Hokkaido Ainu cha, Korean 차, Japanese 茶, Kalaallisut tii, Kannada ಚಹ, Malayalam ചായ, Burushaski ćái, Georgian ჩაი, Basque te, Adyghe щай, Avar чай, Tsez чай, Lak чяй, Lezgian чай, Dargwa чай, Chechen чай, Standard Arabic شاي, Modern Hebrew תה, Mandarin Chinese 茶
Modern Greek τσάι, Latin thea
Polish herbata, Lithuanian arbata
Aleut chaayu-x́, Central Siberian Yupik ӄаюӄ
Tamil தெனீர், Telugu తేనీరు
One colour means one group: words that resemble the whole group, and between different language families the likeness has also passed a chance test. They may be inherited, borrowed, imitated from a sound or, sometimes, a coincidence. Orange is your group. The strip under the map places each language by sound alone: on the left, words almost the same as yours; on the right, words with nothing in common. Tap a dot to see the word and how it is pronounced.
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1 · Tea
Tea reached Europe by two roads
Russians say чай, Turks çay, Persians چای, and in Hindi it is चाय. Max Vasmer’s etymological dictionary traces чай and the Turkic and Mongolic forms to northern Chinese čhā. Romanian took “ceai” from Russian, the DEX says.
The English say tea, the French thé, the Germans Tee. Dutch traders, Europe’s main importers of tea, dealt through Xiamen in Fujian province, where Min Nan is spoken and tea is te. From them the word spread to large parts of Europe, writes the linguist Östen Dahl.
Portuguese is the exception: the Portuguese brought tea before the Dutch, in the 16th century, through Macao, and say chá, from Cantonese.
The map puts all these words in one group, 95 languages from 20 families: the largest group of any of the 1,016 concepts. That grouping makes sense: both forms come from Chinese, cha from Mandarin and most Chinese languages, te from Min Nan. It still misses a few, from Greek τσάι to Polish herbata. The roads also show in the order the languages light up: starting from “tea”, mostly the words like thé and Tee come first, then the ones like чай.
Around the world, the same two families of words
For the World Atlas of Language Structures, Dahl looked up the word for tea in 230 languages on every continent. 110 have a form from cha, 84 one from te, and 36 a word of another origin.
Languages of the countries in eastern Europe and Asia that got their tea overland, rather than from the Dutch, tend to say chai, Dahl writes. The Romanian academy’s dictionary makes the same split between kinds of tea: “Russian” tea was brought from China overland, through Russia; “English” tea by sea, through England.
2 · Mother and father
Mother sounds alike in languages that are not related
In 79 languages out of 107, the first consonant of the word for mother is an m, an n or a soft n, like the ny of Hungarian anya: mamă, мать, anya, ana, amma, ama. They come from 16 language families.
In 1959 the anthropologist George Peter Murdock counted the words for mother and father in hundreds of languages and found this tendency: syllables like ma and na for mother, pa and ta for father, even in languages with no link between them. The linguist Roman Jakobson tied the tendency to children’s first syllables, which adults then gave a meaning.
In Georgian, mama means father
For father, in 58 languages out of 107 the first consonant is p, b, t or d. Georgian does the opposite: father is მამა and mother is დედა. The map now starts from Georgian.
Murdock’s tendency stays a tendency: children’s syllables are alike everywhere, but languages gave them different meanings.
3 · The cuckoo
The cuckoo says its own name
Cuckoo, kakukk, guguk, kukkooq in Greenland, kuku in Basque. On the map, 75 languages from 13 families have a name for the cuckoo like the English one.
It is not just a shared inheritance. Etymological dictionaries call the word imitative: Vasmer sets Turkish, Mordvin, Tatar and Kazakh forms beside Russian кукушка, from languages unrelated to Russian. Many of these names imitate the bird’s call.
4 · March
Rome’s calendar reached Kamchatka
The month names of the Roman calendar are Latin: Martius was the month of Mars. Russian took the name from Latin through Byzantine Greek, Vasmer says. On the map, 68 languages from 14 families say something similar, as far as Itelmen in Kamchatka. In 20 other languages, from Bulgarian and Tatar to Chechen and Kalmyk, the word is spelled exactly as in Russian: март.
Some languages kept names of their own: Finnish maaliskuu, Czech březen, Ukrainian березень, Belarusian сакавік, Lithuanian kovas. The database’s authors included the months precisely because they are easily borrowed, as a test for methods that look for loanwords.
5 · The moon
One word, two things
In Romanian, “lună” is both the moon in the sky and the month in the calendar. So it is in 57 other languages on the map, from 13 families. They are the ones lit up now.
Romanian “limbă” is both the tongue and the language, as in 56 other languages. In 53 languages, tree and wood share a name; in 45 languages, hand and arm. Linguists call this colexification. The CLICS database, which gathers more than 3,000 languages, finds the moon and the month together in 324 of them.
6 · Blue
Where blue ends
With colours, the question becomes where the word stops. In 9 languages on the map, green and blue have the same name, according to NorthEuraLex: Yakut күөх, Ossetian цъӕх, Ainu shiunin, Adyghe, Kurdish and a few more.
The World Color Survey showed 330 coloured chips to speakers of 110 languages, about 24 per language. Draw the line where, for you, green becomes blue.
A screen cannot show the survey’s Munsell chips exactly, so your line is an approximation. The full story is at Where blue ends.
More than half the survey’s languages have one word
Paul Kay and Luisa Maffi’s WALS map has 120 languages, from the survey and related studies. 68 have one word for green and blue, 30 have separate words, and 15 have a word that also covers black. Most are unwritten languages, very different from the 107 on the map above.
7 · The rainbow
The rainbow has dozens of names
Of the 218 concepts that all 107 languages have, the rainbow is among the most divided: 86 groups of words. Many languages describe it: German Regenbogen, the rain’s bow; French arc-en-ciel, the sky’s arc; Hindi इंद्र-धनुष, Indra’s bow.
The map puts Romanian “curcubeu” in the same group as Italian arcobaleno: both have r, c and b in the same order. Arcobaleno is arco and baleno, bow and flash. For “curcubeu”, Romanian dictionaries disagree: the 1998 DEX calls its origin unknown, the 2009 edition only compares it with Latin curvus, bent. The likeness looks like a coincidence of the kind described in the method below: between related languages, words often share a pattern of sounds.
Next time you ask for tea, you use the word the Dutch spread; Russians, Turks and Persians use the one that came overland. In Romanian and 57 other languages, the word for the moon also names the month. And when two words look alike, like “curcubeu” and arcobaleno, it is worth asking whether it is only chance.