Tea by Sea, Cha by Land: The Etymology of Tea
Apart from a few languages, most of the world says the word "tea" in one of two ways.
We say "tea" in English, of course. But similar sounding words are used in many European-based languages too. For example, thé is used in French, and tee is used in languages like German and Afrikaans.
On the other hand, cha is used in countries like Japan and South Korea, and the similar sounding chay or chai is used in languages like Persian, Arabic and Swahili.
But did you know the etymology of the words tea and cha both trace back to China?
In Mandarin Chinese, the character for tea is pronounced cha. But in the Min Nan dialect of Chinese, the same character is pronounced te. Min Nan is spoken mostly by people in Fujian, a southeastern coastal province in China, but it's also spoken in other places, including Taiwan.
Whether a language uses the word "tea" or cha depends on the path the drink took to get there — land or sea.
Countries with languages that use the word cha first got their tea via the Silk Road, the historic land trade route that connected China with the West.
On the other hand, countries that traded with China by sea use the word "tea." One of the first European countries to trade with China, the Netherlands, established trading ports in Fujian and Taiwan — both places that use the word te.
The Dutch then introduced tea to Europe, which led to the widespread use of the word there.
An easy way to remember is this — "tea if by sea and cha if by land."
One exception to this rule is Portugal, which also traded with China by sea, but uses the word chá. This is because the Portuguese traded via Macao, where cha is the word for tea.
