OK, I can’t let everyone off the hook without a little discursive note on the etymology of the word “chai”. It’s Hindi for tea as some of you may know.
Here’s where it gets interesting: think about various languages you speak, and what the word for tea is in those languages. Chances are it’s either some variation on “tee” or “cha”. The theory goes that some languages picked up the Mandarin version (cha) and some picked up the Cantonese version (people will specifically mention “Amoy” which is now Xiamen in southern China). Apparently when the Portuguese got to Asia they picked up the thee version and people who later traded with the Dutch East India Comapny mainly picked up that form of the word. To lift wholesale from wikipedia:
“Languages that have Te derivatives include Armenian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Tamil, Singhalese, Spanish, Yiddish, and scientific Latin. Those that use Cha derivatives include Hindi, Nepali, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Albanian, Czech, Russian, Slovene, Turkish, Tibetan, Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, Greek, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Swahili.”
When we think about India, however, let’s not forget other contributions to English, including shampoo, khaki, and sandals.