Most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce 茶 along the lines of cha, but Min varieties along the Southern coast of China and in Southeast Asia pronounce it like teh. Almost all languages use variants of one or the other, depending on who they got their tea from.
- The Portuguese borrowed chá from Cantonese in the 1550s via their trading posts in Macau.
- The Persians adopted chay from Mandarin, which spread throughout Central Asia.
- The Dutch may have borrowed their word for tea through trade directly from Fujian or Taiwan, or from Malay traders in Java who had adopted the Min pronunciation as teh.
- The Dutch word influenced other European languages, including French (thé), Spanish (té), German (Tee), and English, even after the latter started buying tea directly from Cantonese-speaking merchants
Several articles pointing this out have the headline “Cha if by land, tea if by sea”. This plays on Longfellow’s poem about Paul Revere, in which lanterns are to signal how the British invade: one if by land, and two if by sea.