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Comment by Kbelicius | Hacker News Reader

> this is the reason why India produces tea and Indians drink chai

Chai is just tea or is it not in India?

They're the same thing (besides how they're customarily served). What the parent is getting at is the linguistic aspect: most cultures which imported tea by land over the Silk Road, like India and Turkey, call it something that sounds like "cha". Cultures which imported it by sea, like most of Europe, call it something that sounds like "te".

Tea wasn't a common beverage throughout India before the British. It was known but mostly used as medicinal plant.

Commercial growing was initiated by the British.

The point I was making is that Indians drink tea, and have a tea industry, because of the British.

We imported it by sea (Portugal), and call it Chá.

Yes, but Portugal had colonies in India!

As did UK and Netherlands, and don't use Cha variants.

You might be interested in this: https://qz.com/1176962/map-how-the-word-tea-spread-over-land...

Cha is tea in Chinese. I assume this is Indian naming is mentioned as a carryover from Chinese.

Northern Chinese (Mandarin, etc) call it Cha which became chai etc.

Southern Chinese (Min Nan, etc) call it Teh which became tea etc.

You can see that coastal nations got their tea from the seafaring southern regions whereas much of Central Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe got it from the northerners via the Silk Road.

https://www.reddit.com/r/etymologymaps/comments/g4bmh3/chai_...

In India this is sweetened tea with milk.

The point is that Indians did not reallu drink tea before the British.

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