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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.
No exceptions there - herbata is just shortened version of herbal tea, or how people at that time might call it in fancy latin name - herba thea. Polish also use name czajnik for kettle, which means that they used and maybe even paralelly still use other term for tea, that is common among slavic and turkish people - czaj.
Back in German class in the early '70s, my instructor made this claim for "telephone":
In every other language in the world, it was called "telephone" - inheriting the sound from the American English word for the American invention and and (if necessary) distorting the pronunciation slightly to use the closest phonemes.
But German, with its standard of buildAWordByRunningTogetherADescriptivePhrase, called it a "fernsprecher" (far-speaker).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
To me it seems that even "te" and "cha" are so similar when pronounced that both would have the same word originally.
My suspicion is that it's actually a relatively new word that haven't had the time to divert much and in the modern world with all communication going on the smaller variants disappear. The word is also pretty short and is therefore more resilient compared to "coffee".
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Wandering aimlessly through the Savannah of Tanzania, we came across a village and were offered what essentially herbal tea. The elder called it medicine (at least this is how it was translated). It's still chai in Swahili, but wonder if tea is ever translated as medicine?