Coffee all over the world

Coffee all over the world

An instructive essay on etymology need not always be devoted to a word going back to the hoariest antiquity. It can also deal with an “exotic” borrowing like coffee, for example. Our readers will not find any revolutionary discoveries in this post, but they may be entertained to see how evasive the goal even in such a simple case sometimes is.

The entry coffee in the original OED is excellent, but some details need further discussion. James A. H. Murray, the dictionary’s first editor, doubted (even denied) the connection between coffee and the Abyssinian state Kaffa or Kâfa. Today’s scholarship disagrees with him. For example, in 1955, Paul Kretschmer, one of the best specialists in all things Greek, wrote (I am translating from German): “The name KAFFA is of special interest to us, because the word coffee [he of course said Kaffee] is derived from it. In Kaffa, however, coffee is called bûnô…. Kaffa is now looked upon as the native land of coffee. From there, it spread to Arabia, once believed to be the place where the drink originated. In Arabic, coffee is called bunn, which shows that the Arabs borrowed it from Africa. Other than that, the name of coffee in various languages poses many problems.” He paid some attention to hw in the middle of some names of coffee but did not go into detail. After all, the text in question was only a long footnote.

Below, I will return to hw, but equally intriguing is the stressed vowel in English coffee: why o? German, as we have seen, has Kaffee, and so does the familiar word café from French. In search of some suggestions, I turned to the discussion in Notes and Queries for 1909. It occurred twelve years after the publication of the OED volume with the letter C. Several knowledgeable people took part in that exchange. One of them was James Platt, Junior (1861-1910). This is what he wrote: “The exact sound of a [short], in Arabic and other Oriental languages is that of the English short u, as in cuff. This sound, so easy to us, is a great stumbling block to other nations. A learned German professor once confided to me, with tears in his eyes, that after years of study and long residence in England he was still utterly unable to distinguish between the words colour and collar. In fact, he pronounced them both with o, and most foreigners do the same.”

Platt added that Dutch koffie and kindred forms were the product of similar phonetic despair, while the French type (café) is more correct. And here I’ll risk adding a note that may be of some interest to specialists in the recent history of English sounds. Perhaps similar observations can be found in books earlier and later than Alexander John Ellis’s On Early English Pronunciation (1869-1889). Foreigners hardly have too much trouble mastering today’s British o in hot, not, pot, or collar. But this vowel is an almost insurmountable barrier to some when they try to pronounce those words the American way (especially in its Midwestern variety). For example, Russian speakers in the United States are sure that Boston should be pronounced as Buston, and in their accent, both vowels in potluck sound the same.

I would like to suggest that at the time when Britishers got their first taste of coffee (the middle of the seventeenth century), which is roughly when the colonization of the New World began, the English short o sounded as it does in today’s American Midwest. Americans must have preserved this value. I also believe that even in Platt’s childhood, the British short u (as in put) was different from what we hear today: it seems to have resembled Modern German ö, Scandinavian ø, and French œ. The name Ruskin was in Russia transliterated as Rëskin (here, rë is not unlike German rö). Lunch probably became lënch (quasi lönch; I already knew only the form lench). In Russia, I taught several old women English, and they stubbornly insisted on pronouncing short English u as ö. It appears that the vowel of English coffee owes its existence to the old value of short o (as in pot) and perhaps short u (as in put). Presumably, they were much closer to u (as in today’s cut) and German ö than they are today. To sum up: [o], as in cot, was perilously close to [a], as in cut, while this [a] gravitated toward [ö]. All this caused great confusion.

One also wonders what happened to the original hw in the word’s middle. Platt noted that Finnish has kahvi and Hungarian has kávé and ascribed the change of hw to v to Turkish intermediaries. But other participants in the discussion offered different explanations. According to V. Chattopádhyáya, everything depended on the place of stress: initial in English and variable in other languages. Some examples offered to substantiate this hypothesis are, to my mind, not fully convincing.

Still another participant in the discussion was Colonel W. F. Prideaux, a specialist in several Oriental languages. His short essays on etymology in Notes and Queries (32 in my bibliography; he wrote about other subjects too) deserve being collected and reread. Even Wikipedia has no notion of their existence. Prideaux took issue with James Murray and Platt’s transliteration of the Arabic word as qahwah and of the Turkish word as kahveh: the Turkish form, he insisted, has the same initial consonant as the Arabic one. In his reconstruction, he did without the imaginary Turkish form kafvé and suggested that “on the coast of Arabia and in mercantile towns, the Persian pronunciation was in vogue, whilst in the interior… the Englishman reproduced the Arabic.”

Be that as it may, the multitude of the forms, recorded by travelers between 1573 and 1673, is both curious and confusing. Englishmen wrote coho, cohu, couha, coffao, copha, cowha, cowhe, and once even coffee (1609). The French, Italians, and a Portuguese Jew recorded chaube, caveah, cave, cavàh chaoua, cahoa, and cahue. I am not sure I can easily refer all such differences in the transliteration of the unfamiliar word by English and continental travelers to the differences in the phonetic makeup of their native languages.

Professor Michiel de Vaan, the author of the most recent work known to me on the history of coffee, 2008, was not aware of the exchange discussed above (my bibliography of English etymology appeared only in 2010) and came to the conclusion that Italian, English, and Hungarian forms “are based on Turkish kahve in one way or another.” Prideaux, as we remember, preferred to do without “an imaginary Turkish intermediary” and ascribed the vowel o to the influence of hw. According to De Vaan, some other differences are allegedly due to the place of stress, as Chattopádhyáya thought. The existence of f in coffee and other similar forms remains partly unexplained. “It has been attributed to Armenian traders, who were responsible for part of the spread of coffee from Vienna across Europe.” Platt wrote: “I would point out that in Turkish there is a disposition to substitute f for h.” De Vaan, like all his predecessor, speaks about how European travelers reproduced the stressed vowel of the exotic new word. Perhaps my idea that the older value of British o is also a factor in the history of coffee deserves some attention. In any case, do not let linguistic problems interfere with your enjoyment of a cup of coffee and remember that in Italy, only foreigners order cappuccino after midday.

_{Header photo by form from PxHere. Public domain.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.