For the record, "chai" is just the word for tea; spices are not implied. It does not seem to have been introduced by the British, who knew it as "cha" very early and "tea" for most of their tea-relevant history; the "chai" form comes from Persia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#Etymology
But the British did give it a promotional campaign, during which they fought against the native tendency to add spices:
https://qz.com/1176962/map-how-the-word-tea-spread-over-land...
Definitely no refilling with hot water! As the whole process takes time, I used to make 3-4 cups in the morning and take the remaining tea in a thermos to work.
A "Masala Chai" is milk, water, green tea leaves, tea, cardomom, cloves, grated ginger, a leaf of tulsi and a bunch of other stuff according to taste.
The name of the country that some insist on calling "Persia" is and has always been Iran. Earliest written records are from the Sasanid Empire. "Persia" (meaning Fars) is merely a province of Iran. Iran means "the nation of the Aryans"
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iran
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/eran-eransah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0ahrest%C4%81n%C4%ABh%C4%...
[updated links]
I assume you mean the earliest records that document the name "Iran"? Written records of that region go back multiple thousands of years before the Sasanids.
I did find on Wikipedia at various points the claims that...
- The name "Persia" is just a misunderstanding of the provincial name Fars or Pars; the country has never thought of itself that way.
- The name Iran dates to the 3rd century AD.
Those two claims, both of which you seem to be repeating here, conflict in a pretty obvious way. The classical Greeks fought against and eventually conquered an empire they knew as "Persia", the Achaemenids, several hundred years before the Sasanids were established. Cultural contact between Greece and Persia was quite extensive, with many Greeks serving as mercenaries in Persian armies.
Wikipedia saw a big fight over the endonym of Achaemenid Persia -- the page went from noting it as "Parsa", rendered in Old Persian cuneiform, to claiming it was known by the modern Arabic name, rendered in modern Arabic -- a development at least a thousand years too late to be plausible -- to now recording "ch'shassa" ("the Empire"), again in Old Persian cuneiform.
The name Iran easily could go back long before the Sasanids, in that it represents a piece of culture shared with India and therefore presumably dating to before the Indo/Iranian split. But are you aware of any evidence that the country referred to itself that way during the classical period? Judging by what you can find on Wikipedia, this question is one of major political concern to some groups, and is mostly fought on the basis of assertion rather than evidence.
Equally, it is entirely irrelevant what the Greeks called their neighboring nations.
> the modern Arabic name, rendered in modern Arabic
Have no idea what you are talking about here. Arabs called Iran "Ajam".
> The word ērān is first attested in the titles of Ardašīr I (q.v.), founder of the Sasanian dynasty.
> The combination *aryānām xšaθra- is nowhere found in the Old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenians. In the later Yašts there is only mention of airiiå and anairiiå daiŋhāuuō “Aryan” and (unspecified) “Non-Aryan lands.” Thus the term Ērānšahr was evidently an invention of the Sasanians.
If the name "Iran" dates back to the 3rd century AD, and the name "Persia" dates back to the 5th century BC, it doesn't make sense to claim that "'Persia' is merely a province of Iran".
Cyrus The Great (r. ca. 558-530 B.C.E.). Judging from a variety of evidence, such as some Medians holding important positions under Cyrus, the representation of the Medians in the Persepolis reliefs, and the Medians constituting the most important element in the Achaemenid Empire next to the Persians, it appears that the defeat of Astyages by Cyrus marked a transition from one power to another rather than the total annihilation of one by the other. In fact, Cyrus mixed Medians and Persians in his army as a prelude to his unification of the entire Iranian population and others under his banner.
end quote
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iran-ii1-pre-islamic-t...
And further note that as a Persian I have no interest in diminishing the decisive and leading role of Persians in the historic context of the Iranian civilization.
Modern usage of the name "Persia" to refer to Iran by certain elements of the Anglospehere is in my opinion a malicious imperialist construct. We reject it just as we reject the absurdly denuded "Gulf".
Well this all comes from the Chinese pronunciation.
Persia had old links with China through the silk road. That's how tea, silk etc. got there while Islam reached China very early.
But "chai" pronunciations do not derive directly from China, where there is no such form. And so the use of "chai" can tell us something about how tea got into a particular culture.
'Tea' also derives directly from Chinese but through another Chinese dialect (Southern).
And as you'll see if you read the links posted variously through this subthread, the word for tea which English derived directly from contact with China (in very southerly Guangzhou) was "cha". That word was quickly replaced by "tea", derived from Dutch.
The Dutch word was derived directly from China, but, as you note, from the language spoken in a different region.
How interesting. 'Ceai' is the word for tea in Romanian (https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceai) and it's pronounced almost the same.
Disclosure: Im from Kenya. And chai is just Swahili for the word tea.