What is called tea?

How differently would the words of Juliet have sounded if only Shakespeare had known the beverage we call tea? It’s too bad that the Chinese beverage would not appear in London until forty years after his death. Just consider what great plays The Bard might have penned if only there had been a tea table around which he could have staged an encounter between young lovers such as Romeo and Juliet!In “The Romance of Tea,” William H. Ukers reminds us – The word [tea] is not to be found in the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, or any other publication in English previous to the latter half of the seventeenth century. In the known references to tea in English during the years 1650–9, the word appears in its earlier form of ‘tee,’ but pronounced ‘tay’ until the middle of the eighteenth century. In India, it became chai. In France, the ladies drank thé. Dry Fruits prices in karachi at best prices.How did these different names develop? The Chinese borrowed the names of other shrubs for their earliest references to tea, as the plant did not receive its present appellation (ch’a) until AD 725, and the use of the ideograph ch’a for tea was not in general use before the publication of Lu Yu’s Ch’a Ching in 780. The form of the name that then entered each language depended on the route by which tea was first traded into that country. When tea first traveled outside China to the Arab countries and Russia, the Mandarin word cha spread with the goods. In the Persian, Japanese, and Hindi languages, the word settled as cha, in Arabic shai, in Tibetan ja, in Turkish chay, and in Russian chai.