With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say "tea" in the world. One is like the English term - te in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi.
Both forms come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked. The words that sound like "cha" spread across land, along the Silk Road. The "tea" - like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.
The term cha is Sinitic(汉语语系), meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. It began in China and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming "chay" in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a Cha discovery, tea was traded over 2,000 years ago. The Japanese and South Korean terms for tea are also based on the Chinese cha, though those languages likely adopted the word even before its westward spread into Persia.
But that doesn't account for "tea". Chinese character for tea, is pronounced differently by different varieties of Chinese, though it is written the same in them all. But in the Minnan variety of Chinese, spoken in the coastal province of Fujian, the character is pronounced "te". The key word here is "coastal" .
The "te" form used in coastal - Chinese languages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the primary traders of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th century. The main Dutch ports in east Asia were in Fujian and Taiwan, both places where people used the "te" pronunciation. The Dutch East India company's expansive tea importation into Europe gave us the French "the", the German "Tee", and the English "ta".
Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor belongs to the Portuguese. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where "cho" is used. That's why Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.
