[nimrod0]

"A few languages have their own way of talking about tea. These languages are generally in places where tea grows naturally, which led locals to develop their own way to refer to it. In Burmese, for example, tea leaves are lakphak."

Actually, 'lakphak' is not entirely distinct, and likely related to 'tea,' at least the 'lak' part. The STEDT project has a number of reconstructions across Sino-Tibetan for etyma variously meaning leaf, flat object, and tea: http://stedt.berkeley.edu/~stedt-cgi/rootcanal.pl/etymon/786

See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134698

The first character associated with a 'bitter herb' that later became specific to tea, 荼 (rlya), is probably a cousin of this 'lak' in modern Burmese.