One man's tê is another man's cha

How different are the names for tea around the world? Not very, I was surprised to find. It turns out that just two Chinese pronunciations form the roots from which almost all the world has learned to name tea. From the Hokkien dialect came tê.  The Afrikaans, Estonian and Finnish tee, the Hebrew, Norwegian and Icelandic te, the French thé, the Hungarian and British tea and the Malay teh are just a few of the 40 or so languages that borrowed from the Hokkien original. From the Cantonese and northern Mandarin dialect came cha. This has formed the basis for tea in almost 60 languages. There is the Japanese, Korean and Bangla cha, the Urdu, Hindi, Persian, Pashto, Ukranian, Bulgarian and Swahili chai and variations such as the Punjabi chah, the Assamese saah, the Nepali chiah, as a few examples.  All this you will find nicely tabulated at "tea etymology and cognates in other languages", part of the Wikipedia write-up on tea.

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