Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

Re:Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two... by richardknop on Friday January 12, 2018 @05:00AM (#16131720)

In Slovak tea is caj (ignoring diacritics, or "čaj" as written properly, it's just I have English keyboard and diacritics is hard to use on it). And it’s pronounced as “chaj”. So very similar to cha. And it turns out Slovakia is a landlocked country. Just one data point but seems to be additional evidence.

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Re:Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two... by bitcoinusername on Friday January 12, 2018 @05:14AM (#16131790)

In Croatia it is "čaj". Although it has a coast on Adriatic and coastal people use "čaj" as a word too, despite Italian influence (which uses tè for tea). Even people on islands that were influenced hugely by the Republic of Venice.

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Re:Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two... by smcl on Friday January 12, 2018 @05:21AM (#16131826)

I'm curious - was the Croat language (or some parent of it) pretty predominant during the times of the Republic of Venice? Or is that a "new" thing after the unification of Yugoslavia, and prior to that Italian (or some Venetian dialect) was widely spoken?

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Re:Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two... by Keyframe on Friday January 12, 2018 @05:54AM (#16131957)

It was predominant. Only difference was that latin was predominant in written form until 16th century, after which there was some kind of standardization of the language on one main dialect (we have three) and a movement(s) towards written croatian as well.

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Re:Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two... by bitcoinusername on Friday January 12, 2018 @05:34AM (#16131879)

People living on the island Hvar speak quite a unique version of Croatian. The Venice influence is huge there, graveyard is filled with gravestones of 16th+ century elite.

I sometimes find them hard to understand due to heavy usage of words with Italian roots. But their grammar is equivalent to Croatian grammar.

They also use the word "čaj".

I'd say Croatian as a language was popular and was heavily used on coastal areas even before Italian influence, and after too.

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Re:Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two... by ant6n on Friday January 12, 2018 @05:25AM (#16131849)

I'd say all Slavic languages use that word.

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Re:Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two... by rimliu on Friday January 12, 2018 @05:58AM (#16131975)

Except Polish, like stated above.

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Re:Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two... by ajuc on Friday January 12, 2018 @07:20PM (#16137463)

And Belarussian. And Kashubian.

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