Other languages which use variants on 'cha' to mean
tea include
Portuguese (chá, pronounced 'sha'),
Bengali,
Gujarati and
Korean. In Korean, as in
Chinese, the word is sometimes spelt ch'a to indicate that the 'ch' is
aspirated.
Barley tea - poli or
bori cha, literally
satiation tea - is extremely popular in
Korea: It is drunk at times when westerners would drink water.
Green tea (
nok cha) and
Oolong are also consumed, but not on anything like the same scale as in
China and
Japan. The word 'cha' also means '
car'.
The Korean word 'cha' or 'ja' (spelt differently from the word for tea) can mean 'ruler,' as in a thing you measure things with, or 'here,' and one or two other things; it is also the standard Koreanisation of the Chinese 'tzu' (tsu, tse, zi), which means 'child' or 'master' and is used in the titles of many classical Chinese writers - for instance Chuang-Tzu is Jang-Ja or Chang-Cha, Lao-Tzu is No-Ja, Confucius (Kung-Fu-Tzu) is Kong-Ja and so on.
For those whose browsers can deal with it, the Chinese character 'cha' (tea) looks like this in Unicode:
茶