It is considered barbaric.....
i second this- it's barbaric to eat with bare hands to us the Chinese. in fact, it is considered barbaric to eat with weapons too(fork and knife)But to be fair, it's not barbaric to Indians themselves.
So jsut a different pov by different cultures.
No chance for tea. Chinese pay good price for high quality tea not cheap tea from India and eksewhere. I rather pay good money for high quality tea than people pay good price for liver damaging alcohol
with a whooping list of so many Chinese tea varieties, not to mention that tea originated from China anyway- it's an item that China would never have the need to import.
The
Chinese character for tea is
茶, originally written with an extra stroke as
荼 (pronounced
tú, used as a word for a bitter herb), and acquired its current form during the
Tang Dynasty.
[8][9][10] 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.
[11]One suggestion is that the different pronunciations may have arisen from the different words for tea in ancient China, for example
tú (荼) may have given rise to
tê;
[12] historical phonologists however argued that the
cha,
te and
dzo all arose from the same root with a reconstructed pronunciation
dra, which changed due to sound shift through the centuries.
[13] There were other ancient words for tea, though
ming (
茗) is the only other one still in common use.
[13][14] 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".
[15] 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.
[16] In 1624 the
Hokkien tê from Taiwan reached the West from the ports of Tamsui and Anping, once colonies of Spain and Dutch respectively. The Spanish and Dutch, who spread it to Western Europe. This pronunciation gives rise to English "tea" and other similar words in other languages such as French "thé", German "Tee", and is the most common form worldwide.
[17] 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. Due to the Portuguese occupation of Macau, the Portuguese adopted the Cantonese pronunciation "chá", instead of the more typical Western pronunciations deriving from
tê. 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.[18] They are derived from the Northern Chinese pronunciation of chá,[19]which passed overland to Central Asia and Persia, where it picked up the Persian grammatical suffix -yi before passing on to Russian as чай (chay), Arabic as شاي (pronounced shay due to the lack of a "ch" sound in Arabic), Urdu as چائے chay, Hindi as चाय chāy, Turkish as çay, etc.[20] 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.[13] English has all three forms: cha or char (both pronounced /ˈtʃɑː/), attested from the 16th century;tea, from the 17th; and chai, from the 20th. However, the form chai refers specifically to a black tea mixed with honey, spices and milk in contemporary English.[21]
