Tea was first names by the Chinese, where they had one character that meant tea, but it could be pronouced in two ways in different regions of China. Today’s words for ‘tea’ derive from these two pronouciations in all other langages. In the eastern and sothern ports, as well as areas of Hing Kong the character was pronounced ‘te’, The South and North parts, using the Cantonese dilect would pronouce it ‘cha’. It is not exactly known why the pronaunciation and spelling of these words were modified as tea first came to the West in the 17th and 18th century. We can fing the following variations of the words ‘te’ and ‘cha’
- Te - Catalan, Danish, Hebrew, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, Welsh, Italian
- Tea – English, Hungarian
- Tee – Afrikaans, Finnish, German
- The – French, Icelandic, Indonesian
- Thee – Dutch
- Teh – Javanese, Malay
- Teo – Esperanto
- Thea – Latin
- Teja – Latvian
- Tae – Irish
- Herbata – Polish
- Cha – Thai, Japanese, Portugese, Persian, Korean
- Chai – Russian, Georgian, Ukrainian, Swahili, Urdu, Bulgarian, Hindi
- Caj – Czech, Albanian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Slovene
- Ceai – Romanian
- Cay – Turkish
- Tsai – Mongolian, Greek
- Ja – Tibetan
Great summary! The origin of different names of tea is awsome!