Tae
Tea. The Ulster Scots pronunciation of the same word, preserved in writing as 'tae' to mark the distinctive vowel. Also (by extension) the evening meal: 'come round for your tae' = come for dinner.
Etymology
From standard English 'tea', itself from the Chinese coastal pronunciation of 'cha' that reached European traders through Dutch and Malay. The Scots and Ulster Scots vowel is the older English pronunciation that standard English moved away from in the eighteenth century - speakers in 1700 said 'tay', and Pope's couplets rhyme 'tea' with 'obey'. Standard English shifted to 'tee'; Ulster Scots kept the older vowel.
In a sentence
"What's for tae the night? - just sausages, nothing fancy."
Historical notes
Tae is a small piece of preserved eighteenth-century English in modern Ulster speech. The spelling 'tae' captures a pronunciation that was once universal across the English-speaking world. The extended sense (= the evening meal, the substantial cooked meal in the early evening) is a Northern English and Ulster Scots inheritance: 'your tea is ready' means the food is ready, not just the drink. Most Ulster speakers handle 'tae' in spelling and 'tea' in speech depending on register; some keep the older pronunciation alive in everyday talk.
Sources
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), entry TEA (Scots pronunciation). · dictionary
- Macafee, Caroline. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary