MWW 4: цай

Cyrillic	цай
Transcription	tsai
IPA	[tshæ:]
Layman’s Pronunciation	TSA
Translation	tea; meal
In Genghis Khan’s time it was cai.

Here you go! You get two words this time to make up a little.

Mongolians drink lots of tea. I usually drink it at every meal. Usually, it comes in the form of сүүтэй цай (süütei tsai), or milk tea. However, at the school cafeteria I tend to get “brown tea” which has no added milk. Tea is especially important at breakfast, when it seems that most Mongolians have tea and nothing else. Whenever you visit someone’s house, you’ll get offered tea. Tea is so important to Mongolian’s diets that apparently they can’t conceive of a meal without tea, because sometimes they use the word цай for the entire meal as well as the tea.

Thus, although there is another word, хоол, for “meal,” “breakfast” is called өглөөний цай (öglöönii tsai, “morning tea”) and “lunch” can be either өдрийн хоол (“day meal”) or өдрийн цай (“day tea”).

Хоол goes with the verb идэх (ideh), “to eat,” and цай goes with the verb уух (uuh), “to drink.” So if you want to ask if someone ate breakfast, you say,

Өглөөний цай уусан уу?

Morning.GEN tea drink.PAST QUESTION

“Did you drink morning tea?”

and even if you only had toast and nothing liquid, you could correctly answer,

Тийм, уусан.

Yes drink.PAST

“Yes, (I) drank (it).”

Actually, this isn’t that strange. Other languages have derived a word like "food" or "meal" from a particular food item. In Japanese, gohan means both “meal” and “cooked rice.” (I think the same thing happened in Chinese; examples, please?)