It comes from "herba thea" (herbal tea) so you could argue that it should still be classified under "tea" origin.

But where do we boil water for "herba-ta"? In "Czajnik" (keetle), where root "czaj" most definately comes from "cha".

Lithuanians call tea as "arbata", and it's boiled in "arbatinis". It also has nothing to do with "herbs". AFAIK, there is no reference to the word tea or cha anywhere in terms of tea.

Clearly, arbata comes from the same herbal tea origin, just the h got dropped somewhere along the way, herb -> arba, tea -> ta

This would appear to be confirmed based on regional dialects from this area.

In the Samogitian dialect of Lithuanian it's spelled "erbata", however the first "a" in modern Lithuanian isn't stressed, so it's very similar. Also in Kashubian (spoken in parts of northern Poland, often considered a dialect of Pomeranian) it is the same as modern Lithuanian.

On the other hand in Sambian Prussian it is "tejs", which is similar to "teja" in modern Lativan. It's interesting how two different forms emerged in the same geographic area.

Sorry, but it has everything to do with herbs. As well as Belarusian harbata, and Polish herbata it comes from "herba thea" as mziel wrote.

And the close neighbors of Romania we say "ceainic" to kettle which does come from the root word "ceai".

In Southern Romania we tend to use "ibric" more, which comes directly from Turkish.

In Transylvania, ibric is just the small pot used to brew Turkish coffee, while a tea kettle is ceainic. The terms don’t overlap.

I recently heard from a Turk that ibrik in Turkish today refers only to the small bucket used for washing oneself in Middle Eastern toilets. For the pot used to brew coffee, they say cezve.

In Poland we also have a word 'imbryk' for a teapot but it is rarely used nowadays.

That's partially true. It's from "herba thea", so basically redundantly added the "herb" part to the common tea name.

Derived from the latin herba thea ("herbal tea").

And in Lithuanian it is "arbata", likely from the Polish "herbata" :)

Poland represent! We also have a word for "woman" that is unlike any other Slavic language.

Polish goes its own way.

Other slavic languages (croatian here) also have that word, similar. It means something different though. It meant (that) something different in polish too. "A bit" offensive, haha.

If you mean "kobieta", from what I understand, it used to be offensive until about the 19th century, but the etymology of it is unclear and contested. I have no idea by what process it ceased to be offensive.

If you don't mind my asking: what word is that? I'm only familiar with žena (I speak some Croatian but not enough to know archaisms)

Kobieta, kobila in croatian meaning mare.

That's not the same word. https://goo.gl/7ZZTrd

I don't know russian and can't read most of that anyways. Here's for polish: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kobieta and it's definitely mare in croatian, and via that same in all languages in the region since we share large volume of vocabulary.

You should check in a real etymological dictionary. It's not entirely clear what the origins of 'kobieta' are whereas those of 'mare' are fairly well understood - it helps that it's practically universal in all slavic languages. There are lots of etymological mysteries out there, even surrounding very common words. It's fun to try but they generally don't get resolved by thinking of a somewhat similar-sounding word in a related language and glancing at wiktionary.

The equivalent word for mare is kobyła in Polish. It's unrelated to kobieta.

A steeped beverage from non-tea herbs isn't tea.

This is not true from a language/ word usage point of view. E.g https://www.amazon.co.uk/dandelion-tea/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i...

Well yes the term tea is used "in the wrong way" a lot and one could argue that it is common enough that it's the right usage these days (language evolves etc.). But technically tea is only from camelia sinensis varieties. So the "herbal teas" should technically be called something else like tisane.

Chinese call herbal teas “liang cha”; the argument that “herbal tea” should not be called tea is a somewhat modern English notion. Other languages freely use tea/cha for infusions of many plants.

Heck, why not argue that any “tisane” not made from barley isn’t a real tisane.