Grandma Girl here, I'm in Yon Fog, your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today's topics are why the world primarily has two different words for tea

and some fun slips of the tongue.

There aren't that many words that are said pretty much the same way no matter what language

you speak.

Even the bark of a dog sounds different when spoken by an English speaker,

woof woof, versus a Japanese speaker wan won. But one word that's similar

across many languages might surprise you, It's the word for tea. Now it might

seem a bit odd for something we drink to be the word heard round the world, but the reason

behind this linguistic beverage Kumbaya is linked to where tea was

first cultivated and how it became a hot ticket trade item.

Even more fun, the two main pronunciations we find shared by many languages to say

tea today can be traced to whether tea travelled by land or by sea.

So let's start at the beginning of tea's journey. The plant providing the leaves from which

tea is brewed is known as Camilia Sinasis and it grew wildly in areas like India and China.

Around the 3rd century,

it's thought to have been cultivated for drinking by the Chinese,

though a Chinese legend suggests it was discovered as early as 2737 b.C. when a stray tea leaf inadvertently

blew into the boiled water being prepared for an emperor named Shenang. Needless to say, the emperor was pleased with the result.

Though tea leaves seemed to have been used mainly as a steeped medicinal herb before the 8th century. It was the publication of a book on tea culture by Chinese monk and tea aficionado Lou Yu around 760 CE that really skyrocketed its popularity and made tea drinking the thing to do.

Whether or not the discovery of its brewing potential was accidental,

...