Tea versus cha- an early influence of globalization

[iguanamon]

I read this article today in Quartz Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea. Of course, that's not exactly true. Some languages have their own names for tea-like substances, but ths article is talking about black, and green tea. I have a foot in both camps. Té (Spanish) Chá (Portuguese). What's the word for tea in the language you learn or speak?

With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world. One is like the English term—té in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi.

Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before “globalization” was a term anybody used. The words that sound like “cha” spread across land, along the Silk Road. The “tea”-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.

[gsbod]

I'm a native English speaker who grew up in the south east of England and I grew up using "tea" as standard UK English and "cha" as slang.

And now I'm going to put the kettle on...

[aaleks]

What's the word for tea in the language you learn or speak?

The only language I speak is Russian (I'm not sure if I can count English as a language I actually speak ). In Russian tea is чай, which sounds close to chay (cha?).

[DaveBee]

I'm a native English speaker who grew up in the south east of England and I grew up using "tea" as standard UK English and "cha" as slang.

And now I'm going to put the kettle on...

I'm guessing that 'cha' might have come from british army (stationed in india) slang.

[nooj]

차 (Korean) [tɕʰa]
چای (Persian) [tɕʰɒːj]
أتِي (Moroccan Arabic) [ˈʔatʰæj]

More or less, I reckon this is the right IPA. That's not how tea is spelled in standard Arabic, but I wrote it as it really sounds in MA. The MA word for tea comes from Berber languages, because MA does not admit an article before this word and that is a trait which you find only in Berber loanwords. However, where did Berber get the word from? Apparently from a bit of digging around, it is possibly a 17th century loanword from Dutch!

Sounds roughly like, using English orthography: cha, chAy (with the A being a similar sound to the o in ominous), atay.

[zatris]

I've just checked the original title of Mirolad Pavić's Landscape Painted with Tea (extraordinary novel, by the way) and the Serbo-Croatian word for it seems to be the land one, čaj. (Actually it is čajem in the title of the book, which according to Wiktionary is the instrumental case.)

In French it is thé.

Portuguese, however, while using the Cantonese-derived term (chá), acquired it via sea, not land. It's funny how even then it ended up with the term that spread by land trade.

Edited to add that I hadn't read the article before posting, and it mentions the same fact.

[dampingwire]

I'm a native English speaker who grew up in the south east of England and I grew up using "tea" as standard UK English and "cha" as slang.

And now I'm going to put the kettle on...

I'm guessing that 'cha' might have come from british army (stationed in india) slang.

I think it's earlier: the OED has 1616 as the earliest citation.

[Xenops]

In Japanese it's お茶、or in Romanji, ocha, the "o" only being there for politeness. From my Pimsleur lessons in Persian, it sounded like "chai".

[Josquin]

In Irish, it's "tae", which is roughly pronounced like "tay". I always thought the word might have come from English, but given that so many other languages share the word, it may have a different source, e.g. French or Dutch.

In Scottish Gaelic, it's "tì", which certainly comes from English.

[Chung]

Polish is an oddball by using herbata which comes from Latin herba thea "herb tea".

Everything else seems hum-drum.

Finnish: tee
German: der Tee
Hungarian: tea
Slovak: čaj

Not even more "exotic" languages are that interesting on this score.

Meadow Mari: чай
Mongolian: цай
Northern Saami: deadja
Tuvan: шай