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