All words / Travelling words / tea 茶
tea · 3 etymological groups
“tea” in 35 languages What a language calls tea shows the route it arrived by. Places reached by sea from Fujian say te; those reached from Canton or overland say cha; and through Persian it became chāy.
Indo-European19 languages Germanic
English tea German Tee Dutch thee Swedish te Icelandic te
Italic
Latin — Ancient Rome had no tea.
French thé Spanish té Italian tè Portuguese chá Romanian ceai Slavic
Russian чай chay Polishnote herbata
Baltic
Lithuaniannote arbata
Celtic
Irish tae Welsh te
Indo-Iranian
Persian چای chāy Hindi चाय chāy
Uralic Finnish tee Estonian tee Hungarian tea
Afroasiatic Arabic شاي shāy Hebrew תֵּה te
Sino-Tibetan Mandarin 茶 chá
Austroasiatic Vietnamesenote trà
Austronesian Indonesian teh Filipino tsaa Hawaiian — No native word.
Language isolates Basque te
The words and etymologies here were compiled by an AI (Claude) from its trained knowledge and have not been reviewed by a specialist. Items with a source have been checked against that source; anything without one may contain errors.
Spotted a mistake? Let us know at ateliercat24@gmail.com .
Forms marked * (such as *ḱwṓ) are reconstructed: no record of them survives, and they are rebuilt by comparing their descendants. Dog, water, mother, moon and three are on the Swadesh list, the basic vocabulary used in comparative linguistics. Cat and tea are here as words that travelled along with the thing they name.
Sources are linked, not reproduced. Wiktionary content is available under CC BY-SA; WALS Online under CC BY.
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