source: https://twitter.com/PadraigBelton/status/951948982309261312
If tea spread to your country by sea, you call it ‘tea’. If by land, you call it chai. (*This is because the ports of Fujian and Taiwan use the coastal pronunciation ‘te’, whereas Mandarin uses chá.) https://octodon.social/media/sg1pHoupiOPe8BBjSXU
@Siphonay so it arrived to Japan by land? ;)
@kiilas that was valid only for outside Asia I guess
@Siphonay aw, cool! i like this kind of language stuff.
@Siphonay probably the most succinct explanation of the phenomenon I've ever saw :-)
@Siphonay
Im v curious to whats the word in north African languages/arabic varieties and Burmese languages now, and their origin
@Siphonay
Some neat links I bumped into looking into this
@Siphonay
Southeast asian languages that have a paradigm outside of *te/*çai seem to have cultures around eating or fermenting tealeaves that predate the proliferation of tea as a drink
Berber and maghrebi Arabic seem to use <الشاي aš-šāy> and <ⴰⵜⴰⵢ atay> both pronounced like a *te derivative but seemingly from *çai so ?
@Siphonay
Also yessss I have never heard the yiddish word for samovar and now totally gonna call my kettles Çayniks
@Siphonay That's super cool jeopardy like information. Love it.