I’m interested in the “’chai’ means tea” and “’chai’ is a type of tea, ‘tea’ means tea” divide in languages.
Team Chai:
- Hindi – चाय (chaay)
- Urdu – چائے (chai)
- Arabic – شاي (shay)
- Turkish – çay
- Amharic – ሻይ (shayi)
- Somali – shaah
- Swahili – chai
- Bosnian – čaj
- Russian – чай (chai)
- Greek – τσάι (tsai)
- Chinese – 茶 (cha)
- Thai – ชา (cha)
- Portuguese – chá
Team Tea:
- English – tea
- German – tee
- Danish – te
- Dutch – thee
- Africaans – tee
- Yoruba – tii
- Sudanese – téh
- Hungarian – tea
- French – thé
- Italian – tè
- Spanish – té
Team Neither:
- Finnish –
iltapäiväateria (also uses loanword ‘tee’)
- Lithuanian – arbata
- Japanese – お茶 (ocha)
- Korean appears to use both 차 (cha) and 티 (ti)
My (completely unsupported, unresearched) theory is that Germanic and Romance languages tend toward the “tea” root, and other major language families tend toward “chai” especially languages spoken in largely Islamic areas (Arabic, Turkish, Amharic, Urdu) but there are many examples that break that pattern.
(Native speakers, please correct me! I do not speak these languages, can’t comment on everyday usage, and can only read Roman characters and Cyrillic. Google Translate was used for a large chunk of info.)
Actually, “chai” and “tea” are from different chinese dialects for the pronunciation of 茶.
Hmm, you know what? there’s a wiki page for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_tea
And the お in japanese is just a polite prefix (like お菓子), so tea in japanese is in team cha (I mean, they literally use the same Kanji 茶 *shrug*)
NICE!!!!!! Bless! I didmt know that
We never have used the tea root we learned it from French and English but we don’t use it because we know it as tsai now and also if you say Tea in Greek it means “what” so it would be confusing
But I neve knew that about ‘tea’
That’s great to know!!
Are there puns in greek about “You drink… what?” “Yeah, I drink tea.” ??
A Force Sensitive Phasesixer 