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Why the World Only Has Two Words For Tea (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say "tea" in the world. One is like the English term -- te 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.
The term cha is "Sinitic," meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. It began in China and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming "chay" in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a recent discovery, tea was traded over 2,000 years ago. This form spread beyond Persia, becoming chay in Urdu, shay in Arabic, and chay in Russian, among others. It even it made its way to sub-Saharan Africa, where it became chai in Swahili. The Japanese and Korean terms for tea are also based on the Chinese cha, though those languages likely adopted the word even before its westward spread into Persian. But that doesn't account for "tea." The te form used in coastal-Chinese languages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the primary traders of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th century, as explained in the World Atlas of Language Structures. The main Dutch ports in east Asia were in Fujian and Taiwan, both places where people used the te pronunciation. The Dutch East India Company's expansive tea importation into Europe gave us the French the, the German Tee, and the English tea.
The term cha is "Sinitic," meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. It began in China and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming "chay" in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a recent discovery, tea was traded over 2,000 years ago. This form spread beyond Persia, becoming chay in Urdu, shay in Arabic, and chay in Russian, among others. It even it made its way to sub-Saharan Africa, where it became chai in Swahili. The Japanese and Korean terms for tea are also based on the Chinese cha, though those languages likely adopted the word even before its westward spread into Persian. But that doesn't account for "tea." The te form used in coastal-Chinese languages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the primary traders of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th century, as explained in the World Atlas of Language Structures. The main Dutch ports in east Asia were in Fujian and Taiwan, both places where people used the te pronunciation. The Dutch East India Company's expansive tea importation into Europe gave us the French the, the German Tee, and the English tea.
Polish language is an interesting exception -- "herbata" = "tea".
In Portuguese the word is "chá" and originated in Macau. That does not match the article theory: it came through sea trade, at least in that case.
You cannot proceed from the informal to formal by formal means
DId you read the article? It discusses this interesting anomaly.
Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor belongs to the Portuguese, who are responsible for the island of Taiwan’s colonial European name, Formosa. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where chá is used. That’s why, on the map above, Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
To me it seems that even "te" and "cha" are so similar when pronounced that both would have the same word originally.
The clue is in TFS. Cha is the Standard (Mandarin) Chinese word. The same Chinese character is pronounced te in the Hokkien dialect spoken in Fujian and Taiwan where the Dutch traders were taking tea to Europe from. What is interesting is that the Japanese is also cha. Most other Chinese words seem to have come to Japanese from the Hokkien pronunciation (ie up through Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands).
Zulu: itiye
Lithuanian: arbata
Samoan: lauti
Malagasy: dite
Polish: herbata
Maltese: corto
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your teacher must have learned German before the Second World War. The young probably wouldn't even know what a `Fernsprecher` is. They'd assume that's a person doing something. And older Germans would be slightly amused by someone using this ancient term. It's a `Telefon` in proper German.
But the term for mobile phone is peculiar, here you're exactly right, the official word is `Mobiltelefon` (so a mobile phone), but basically everyone calls it a `Handy`, which is an artificial word derived from bullshitized English. Actually, you'll encounter a lot of Germans who'll ask you for your handy number, referring to your cell.