From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!houxm!houxa!houxi!houxz!ihnp4!ixn5c!inuxc!pur-ee!ecn-pa:scott Newsgroups: net.nlang Title: Cognates in lots of languages Article-I.D.: ecn-pa.791 Posted: Fri Mar 11 13:33:02 1983 Received: Sat Mar 12 08:43:32 1983 There are a few words which are almost the same in a *lot* of languages, like "ma", "pa", etc. One word in that class is the word "tea". I don't know of any good reason why this should be true, but here is "tea" in the languages that I know about. I've written it more or less phonetically (sorry, not IPA) for comparisons sake. Does anybody know why this is true? English t'i French te German te Russian chai Hindi chai Mandarin ts'a Cantonese ts'a Vietnamese cha Random House says that it comes from the Amoy dialect of Chinese (t'e), but it seems unlikely to me that it could have spread so well to so many languages. Scott Deerwester Purdue University