Etymology of tea
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
"tee tee" : You say this when you are a foreigner (like myself) and you want to tell a Finn to make tea. Saying "tee tee" will make two things happen simultaneously and immediately: 1) the Finn will switch to English, and 2) if it's your girlfriend or wife, she will tell you to make your own damn tea. Less certain and immediate is whether you actually get a cup of tea. Correct, but less interesting: "tee teetä".
"te teette teetä" : A correct way of either commanding a group of people to make some tea, or of letting them know that the are, in fact, making tea, ie: You all are making some tea.
(Read "ee" above as a kind of extended "eh": eeehhh, and "ä" as the short a as in "hat" (like, "hät" is pronounced exactly like hat is))
As a Swede, I can just add that the spelling come in quite many forms: te (official), té, the, thé, tea...
https://qz.com/1176962/map-how-the-word-tea-spread-over-land...
Also, there were other brews, for example from mint before here. So herbata was not exciting in any way. But eventually it made it through and is now main beverage here with a distinct name across whole Europe.
Almost. Unsurprisingly, given their history, the only word for tea in Lithuanian is the same - arbata - borrowed from Polish.
In Belarus they also use it in parallel with the Russian word (no idea which one is more common in daily usage).
I've never, ever encountered "cha" or "char" in my English speaking country (US) - is this something commonly encountered in England?
From the article, OED definition 3 for "char": https://www.lexico.com/definition/char#h69854260165380
The main article on tea in the history and origin section has some of the earliest attestations in English cited:
"The first record of tea in English came from a letter written by Richard Wickham, who ran an East India Company office in Japan, writing to a merchant in Macao requesting "the best sort of chaw" in 1615. Peter Mundy, a traveller and merchant who came across tea in Fujian in 1637, wrote, "chaa – only water with a kind of herb boyled in it ".[45][46]"
Slightly connected: I Just recently learned frkm Wikipedia that the word coco/côco from the coconut fruit comes from a portuguese folklore figure that i never heard of. Which is weird because I am portuguese and my parents also never heard of any similar folklore. We have a an expression which translates to "break the coco laughing" which i always took to be related to the fruit and now I think it may be a remnant of the folklore figure that gave the name to the coconut fruit.
Also, based on the series there is this popular music "A Cuca te pega", or in a free English translation: "The Cuca catch you". [3]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%ADtio_do_Picapau_Amarel...
Maybe somewhat less these days, but still there.