I know the history of the word very well, and I understand that clickbait headings have to simplify. But if you want to call CHA and TEA different words, in wh

I know the history of the word very well, and I understand that clickbait headings have to simplify. But if you want to call CHA and TEA different words, in what sense are TEA and THE (French) the same word? I would say they are either all the same word (how I would phrase it) or all different - since they are in different languages. But this is all semantics, not very interesting really.