Catherine of Braganza, the Queen Who Brought Tea to England
thecollector.com
thecollector.com
The words T.E.A. were written on boxes carrying the expensive substance from India.
That means: Transporte de Ervas Aromáticas (Transport of Aromatic Herbs)
For starters, tea is from China, not India (EDIT: this isn't totally correct, but tea drinking as a habit, rather than as a medicine, didn't exist in India until the colonial era). And why wouldn't they just write "chá" on the boxes?
Take for instance the upper-story medieval buildings that jut out over the first floor. NEVER done for tax reasons; ALWAYS done for a perfectly simply structural reasons. For the tax story to have an ounce of truth, there would have to have been invariant, multi-country, identical tax laws about footprints of houses.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tea#/media/File%3ANames_for_t...
Also, 'oo long' is black dragon.
Almost every purported etymology of a well-established word being an acronym of an even older phrase is an urban legend. Another example: "fuck" being an acronym for "fornication under consent of the king". It's baloney.
I'm not talking about modern words like "scuba" or "laser" obviously.
That was indeed part of what you were talking about.
I agree that most folk etymologies involving acronyms are wrong, but don't move your goalposts.
How so?
Even if the tea came from different ports in China, it was going to Portugal. The crates would be labeled in Portuguese. In which case there's no reason to write "cha" or "té" based on where the crate was shipping from. After the first time someone named tea in Portuguese it should always be "cha".
Or the crate would be labeled 茶 and whatever is the Chinese character for "cha", which no one in Portugal could read.
Either way the "tea" etymology story falls apart. There's no reason for it to be labeled "tea".
Those boxes wouldn't write "chá" because they often contained cinnamon, sugar and many other valueable spices. The point wasn't advertising the specific content, but more to remember that those specific boxes should not be placed on the bottom of the boat, where water would spoil the contents.
However the right wording is Chá, and it needs to be explicitly mentioned of what.
Chá preto - black tea
Chá de ervas - herbs tea
And so on.
That explanation is… highly unlikely.