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"Tea" is ruined by my native language, Polish: herbata. Robot seems to be a good candidate though: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/robot https://en.wiktionary.or

• jim180 3y ago
  and apparently Lithuanian borrowed that from Polish: arbata. Quick Google showed, that herbata comes from Latin: herba thea
  • yakubin 3y ago
    Where the “thea” part comes from Chinese. It would be bizarre for a beverage discovered in ancient China (and brought to Europe only a couple centuries ago) to be named in latin.
    • fy20 3y ago
      Herbal teas were common in Europe before camellia sinensis tea was imported, so I find it hard to believe the Latin origin is correct. In Lithuanian 'arbarta' colloquially refers to all types of hot water infused drinks, there isn't any distinction of what kind of leaf or fruit (e.g. raspberry or buckthorn tea) is used. On the other hand, the consensus in English is that where wasn't a word for this type of drink, you just used the herb's name itself.
      • yakubin 3y ago
        > Herbal teas were common in Europe before camellia sinensis tea was imported They weren’t called teas though. tê is the name in Hokkien and that’s where all the similar-sounding names for tea come from originally… in countries where tea was originally brought from China via sea. The Polish name herbata was coined in the XVIIth century specifically for camelia sinensis, but due to general ignorance about what it actually was beyond “an infusion from some weed with medical applications” the word lost precision.
• yakubin 3y ago
  Half the world also calls it “cha” or some variant thereof.
• sn41 3y ago
  Both tea and cha come from the same word, but using different pronunciations in Chinese, I think: cha is Mandarin, and tea is Hokkien.