Hacker News Reader

Comment by _0nac | Hacker News Reader

Nit: Western (black) tea is 紅茶 hongcha, lit. "red tea". Chinese black tea refers to fermented teas like pu-erh, which are not the same thing.

View on HN

Interestingly pu-erh is often referred to as "red tea" in Western countries.

I've only heard "red tea" used to refer to rooibos tea.

Specifically in Poland: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu-erh

Translating the article: Pu-erh (chin. 普洱茶, pǔ’ěr chá) – a kind of tea that is classified as red tea in Poland (black tea in China since the Chinese classify the tea according to the colour of the brew, as opposed to Europeans who classify tea according to the colour of dried leaves).

Ahh, Polish, also one of those outlier languages that doesn't call tea by the two words in the article :)

The article has it wrong, as I mentioned in another comment. Polish word for tea is "herbata" which comes from "herbal tea".

Not exactly. According to Bruckner, it comes from simplification of herba thea, which means "plant of tea", not "herbal tea". Then the cluster of Polish herbata, Belarusian harbata, and Lithuanian arbata grows from the same te-, even if it sounds so different, so the article is not THAT wrong. Though, I agree the statement "the world has..." is still technically incorrect as there are more languages around, than just English, and words for tea are many even if they are all of the same roots.

Same here. I live in San Francisco and to the best of my knowledge, Pu-erh seems to be called just that. “Red tea” is not often said, but I would assume it meant rooibos. (BTW — if you haven't tried rooibos, please do. It is delicious.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com