A semi-related question: Are there any major world languages that have NOT adopted the American “Okay”? It always makes me smirk to hear Italians or Chinese slip it into their conversations.
And Akatsukami, no offense intended here, but your sig line is starting to make me worry a little about you, okay?
I saw an interesting linguistic exhibit in a museum in Macau that demonstrated that, in a great many of the world’s languanges, the word for “tea” is related either to the Mandarin Chinese word “cha” (e.g. chai, etc.) or the Fujian Chinese word “te” (e.g. tea, etc.) I don’t remember all of the examples. (It seems not inconceivable that cha and te could be reated through an intermediate consonant sound like “ts”. But Im no linguist.)
“Bye-bye” and “sorry” seem to have made their way into standard Cantonese.
You can trace the migration of the Mandarin word cha2 (formerly spelled ch‘a) across the Silk Road, through Central Asia into Russia, India, and Turkey. Because the Silk Road’s terminus was in Mandarin-speaking country, northern China. In Central Asia the word was Persianized by the addition of a final -y glide. This is a characteristic of the Persian language: any open monosyllable word ending in a long vowel can have a -y added. So cha2 became chây in Persian. It’s also chai in Russian, câî in Hindi, çay in Turkish.
In southeast China, south of the Yellow River, the Fujian or Amoy-Hokkien pronunciation of the character for tea was pronounced [te]. It was mostly Chinese speakers from this language area who migrated to Southeast Asia, or Nanyang as the Chinese call it. Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Thus the word for tea is teh in Malay. The Portuguese and Dutch were the first Europeans to bring the article as well as the word for it to western Europe. The fact that English, French, Italian, German, etc. call it tea or thé or something like that is owed to the Dutch East India Company.
I don’t know whether in some Chinese dialect there exists a form with the intermediate [ts]. I do know that in general the southern versions of Chinese are much more conservative as to consonants, while Mandarin is more innovative. IANAS (I am not a Siniticist), but I guess the proto-Chinese word began with t-.
In Polish they call it by a compound word: herba-te (which doesn’t mean ‘herbal tea’ but just tea, Camellia sinensis).
<utter hijack>
ElvisL1ves writes:
(He was, of course, referring to that sig block that read:
)
Good of you to worry about me. Whilst I agree that references to Al Gore (who?) are now as dated as references to Charles Lindberg, I just hadn’t found another suitably amusing quotation…until recently.
</utter hijack>
The existence of two forms of the Chinese word for tea has made possible a new doublet in English: tea vs. "chai." The trendy “new” drink of recent years, “chai” has now become a naturalized English word.
And you’ve got all these Americans imagining that “chai” means a specially prepared tea with sugar and spice and milk. When in fact it just means ‘tea’, plain & simple, any old kind of tea, in Hindi. In India it so happens that tea is almost always prepared with milk and sugar. (There’s something atavistic about returning to the blissful comfort of the infant nursing from mother’s breast. Indian chai gives that experience through its sweet, warm, milky quality–however, for grownups it has the caffeine kick added. No wonder the stuff is so addictive!) Black tea in India is only given to sick people and thought of as more medicinal than pleasurable. Most everyday chai in India doesn’t have the spice masala added; they just do that once in a while; many Indians never spice their tea. The linguistic phenomenon is “marked” versus “unmarked” forms: in English tea is the “unmarked” word for Camellia sinensis–it has the most general meaning, applied to any kind of tea. The new development in English is to have chai as the “marked” form: limited to a certain specially prepared kind of tea. In Hindi, chai is unmarked. If you go to India and want to order what Americans think of as “chai,” you have to qualify it with a modifier and say “Masala chai, please.”
O, ye work all day
for sugar in your tay…
… however, the Irish word for “tea” is tae - and it rhymes with the English “day”. “Tea” in everyday Hiberno-English doesn’t.
Alexander Pope has the line (in Rape of the Lock) “doth sometimes cousel take, and sometimes tay”. It sounds strangely Irish.
ruadh, some Irish people do say “tay” in English, and indeed some say “cha” (older members of my mother’s side and my father’s side of the family, respectively).
You’re more the expert here than me 
but it strikes me as a peculiarly Dublin, and more peculiarly working-class Dublin, pronunciation. I can’t recall ever hearing it in any other Irish accent.
My American Heritage Dictinary notes that ma- (root of the Latin mamma, “breast”, and hence root of “mammal”, etc.; and, in the extended form mater–ma- with the suffic -ter denoting kinship–root of the Latin and Greek mater and meter and all their derivatives and the English “mother”) is “an imitative root derived from the child’s cry for the breast (a linguistic universal found in many of the world’s languages, often in reduplicated form).” The name of the Mande branch of the Niger-Congo language family in West Africa comes from the same source.
Another baby talk root is baba-, “imitative of unarticulated or indistinct speech; also a child’s nursery word for a baby and for various relatives.” It is thus the root of the English words “baby” and “babble”; the Italian bambino; the Greek barbaros or “barbarian” (“foreigner who speaks incomprehensible gibberish”); and the Slavic baba (as in babushka), i.e., old woman or grandmother.
I would have thought it was the reverse, that we have more words for coffee than Inuits do for snow, java, joe, mud…
Damn, I was all ready to pounce on this one, but you beat me to it! I’ll throw in the few tidbits left to me.
Mango = xoài (not xoai)
Taxi = tác xi (should have a saucer-shaped thing between the a and the acute accent)
Ðiên thoai should also have some more diacriticals, but until we get real Unicode support, we can’t type them in.
(How is it that an “attractive” polyglot Vietnamese has escaped my attention on this board for so long? I thought Opus was the only other Vietnamese speaker.)
Eh, really? I thought this was place name derived.
I’ve tried to learn that language for the last ten years. I’ve managed to pick up more Cantonese words (without making an attempt to learn) than Vietnamese. Man, it’s one tough language.
I can swear in it though! 
A quick question (possibly a stupid question, but I’m neither a linguist or a musician): Does the fact that Vietnamese is a tonal language make it more difficult to write song lyrics than in a non-tonal Western language?
erm…that should be “neither…**nor **”. I rest my case about the linguist bit. D’uh. :o
There are no stupid questions, just ones that are easier to ridicule!
It’s a hard question to answer though, because you really need to find someone who speaks both languages fluently and composes song lyrics in both. From what I’ve seen, the music must follow the tones to some extent, but not entirely. On the other hand Vietnamese words are all one syllable so it’s easier to fit them into a tune. I just don’t have the experience to give you a better answer … and in any case we’ve strayed pretty far from the OP!
Mande – Mandingo: ma-, “mother” + -nde, dimunitive suffix. See also Mandingo
Mandingo – Mandingo: ma-, “mother” + -ndi, -nde, dimunitive suffix + -ngo, variant of -ko, suffix of nationality or tribe.
Or so saith the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
Huh, interesting. Thanks.