Changes

The words for "tea" in most languages of the world fall into one of two groups: they either sound more or less like ''teh'' or like ''cha''. The English word "tea" is an example of the former, the Russian ''chay'' – of the latter. If you trace the etymologies to their ultimate origins, it turns out that they both come from different dialects of Chinese. There's a popular explanation that the word for tea used in a given place depends on whether tea first arrived there by land or by sea. And it's actually quite accurate. ''Teh'' comes from Amoy, a dialect of the Min Nan branch of Chinese, spoken in the port city of Xiamen on the Taiwan Strait. Dutch traders must have picked it up there and spread the word, as well as tea itself, in western Europe. ''Cha'', on the other hand, is the form used in the northern varieties of Chinese. The word was borrowed from there, at various stages, into Japanese, Korean and Persian. The ''cha'' form was also used in the Cantonese port city of Macau, visited by Portuguese trading vessels, which explains why Portuguese stands out among western European languages and refers to tea as ''chá''. In Persian ''cha '' became ''chay '' and in this form was further borrowed into Russian and thence, into all other Slavic languages.