domingo, abril 08, 2007
Whisky con agua
Whisky. Palabra del inglés derivada del gaélico "uisce beatha", pronunciado aproximadamente [ushki bia] y que significa literalmente "agua de vida", y por lo tanto es equivalente en significado a palabras como "aquavit" o "eau de vie". Al igual que otra bebida de alta graduación, el "vodka" ruso, que literalmente significa 'agüita' - voda, en ruso -, se remonta a una raíz indoeuropea *wed/*wod/*ud de donde se deriva el gaélico "uisce", 'agua' (< *wed-skio) o el inglés "water", 'agua' (< *wod-or).
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había escuchado hace años la cosa de la etimología de la palabra whisky (güisqui para los amigos de la RAE)...Del vodka...pues no había hecho la asociación con voda. supongo que detrás de muchos nombres de bebidas hay etimologías basadas en algo medio místico...porque agua de vida por ahi por ahi va. Bueno, el misticismo está más en la composición de la cosa que en los efectos. Bueno...etimología meets atropología y demás. La etimología de te-tea-tee (etc.) contrapuesta a chá y demás tiene su interés también.
Sobre la etimología de té he encontrado esto en "http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/Chen_amb.html":
In the Mandarin, the Northern dialect of Chinese, the logograph 茶 “tea” is pronounced as cha; consequently, this form was borrowed by languages spoken in those countries that imported their tea by inland traffic via the silk route, which originated from the Northern region of China. Examples are Hindi and Urdu cha [चा, چاء] or chay [चाय, چاۓ, چائے], Farsi chay [چای], Arabic shay [شاي], Dhivehi sai [ސައި], Amharic shayi [ሻይ], Tigrinya shahi [ሻሂ], Russian and Macedonian chaj [чай, чај], Georgian chai [ჩაი], Turkish çay, Greek tsai [τσάι], Romanian ceai and Czech čaj.
Some nations neighbouring China have similar names for “tea”: In Thai [ชา], Korean [차] and Japanese [茶, ちゃ], the name is invariably cha. These names might have proceeded also from the Mandarin form or from some other Chinese dialect with similar pronunciation of that word. For example, in Cantonese the sign 茶 is pronounced as chah, rather close to the Mandarin form.
In countries where tea entered by seabound trade, the word took a different shape defined by the Amoy (Minnan) dialect, which is spoken in the coastal Fujian province in the East of China and in Taiwan. In that area, the glyph 茶 is pronounced te. Thus, the name of tea is teh in Indonesian and Malay, thee in Dutch and tea in English, where the vowel was originally pronounced as in lay. The Dutch and English forms became the predecessors of most names of tea in the tongues of Western Europe, e.g., French thé, Italian tè, Norwegian, Swedish and Welsh te, Finnish and Estonian tee, Latvian tēja, Yiddish tey [טײ] and also Hebrew teh [תֵּה]. Cf. also Telugu teyaku [తేయాకు] “tea”.
Some languages have forms of both types, e.g., Kannada chaha [ಚಹಾ] and te [ಟೇ] “tea” or Tamil chaya [சாய] “tea” and teyilai [தேயிலை] “tea leaf”. In Vietnamese, the plant is denoted che [chè] and the beverage tra [trà] (spoken approximately cha in the South).
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