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Coffee Etymology

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DEALING WITH THE ETYMOLOGY OF COFFEE — from William H. Ukers’s All About Coffee (1922)

Origin and translation of the word from the Arabian into various languages—Views of many writers

THE history of the word coffee involves several phonetic difficulties. The European languages got the name of the beverage about 1600 from the original Arabic  qahwah, not directly, but through its Turkish form, kahveh. This was the name, not of the plant, but the beverage made from its infusion, being originally one of the names employed for wine in Arabic.

Sir James Murray, in the New English Dictionary, says that some have conjectured that the word is a foreign, perhaps African, word disguised, and have thought it connected with the name Kaffa, a town in Shoa, southwest Abyssinia, reputed native place of the coffee plant, but that of this there is no evidence, and the name qahwah is not given to the berry or plant, which is called  bunn, the native name in Shoa being būn.

Contributing to a symposium on the etymology of the word coffee in Notes and Queries, 1909, James Platt, Jr., said:

The Turkish form might have been written kahvé, as its final h was never sounded at any time. Sir James Murray draws attention to the existence of two European types, one like the Frenchcafé, Italian caffè, the other like the English coffee, Dutch koffie. He explains the vowel o in the second series as apparently representing au, from Turkish ahv. This seems unsupported by evidence, and the v is already represented by the ff, so on Sir James’s assumption coffee must stand for kahv-ve, which is unlikely. The change from a to o, in my opinion, is better accounted for as an imperfect appreciation. The exact sound of ă 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. I judge that Dutch koffie and kindred forms are imperfect attempts at the notation of a vowel which the writers could not grasp. It is clear that the French type is more correct. The Germans have corrected their koffee, which they may have got from the Dutch, into kaffee. The Scandinavian languages have adopted the French form. Many must wonder how the hv of the original so persistently becomes ff in the European equivalents. Sir James Murray makes no attempt to solve this problem.

Virendranath Chattopádhyáya, who also contributed to the Notes and Queries symposium, argued that the hw of the Arabic qahwah becomes sometimes ff and sometimes only f or v in European translations because some languages, such as English, have strong syllabic accents (stresses), while others, as French, have none. Again, he points out that the surd aspirate h is heard in some languages, but is hardly audible in others. Most Europeans tend to leave it out altogether.

Col. W.F. Prideaux, another contributor, argued that the European languages got one form of the word coffee directly from the Arabic qahwah, and quoted from Hobson-Jobson in support of this:

Chaoua in 1598, Cahoa in 1610, Cahue in 1615; while Sir Thomas Herbert (1638) expressly states that “they drink (in Persia) … above all the rest, Coho or Copha: by Turk and Arab calledCaphe and Cahua.” Here the Persian, Turkish, and Arabic pronunciations are clearly differentiated. Continue reading “Coffee Etymology” →

Hot Summer Day — Fyodor Vasilyev

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John Huston’s Film Adaptation of Under the Volcano (Full Film)

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(Here’s my review of Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano).

Creation with Astral Rays — Remedios Varo

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Six Figments from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books

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  1. A blind man on a dark night carried a torch, in order that people might see him, and not run against him, and direct him how to avoid dangers.
  2. To picture a child’s (one of four or five years old) reminiscences at sunset of a long summer’s day,–his first awakening, his studies, his sports, his little fits of passion, perhaps a whipping, etc.
  3. The blind man’s walk.
  4. To picture a virtuous family, the different members examples of virtuous dispositions in their way; then introduce a vicious person, and trace out the relations that arise between him and them, and the manner in which all are affected.
  5. A man to flatter himself with the idea that he would not be guilty of some certain wickedness,–as, for instance, to yield to the personal temptations of the Devil,–yet to find, ultimately, that he was at that very time committing that same wickedness.
  6. What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?

Notations from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books.

 

The Country School — Winslow Homer

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The Human Beast — Jean Renoir

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Creative writing (Calvin and Hobbes)

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The Black Cow — Camille Corot

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“Heat” — Denis Johnson

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“Heat” by Denis Johnson—

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover

tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.

It’s beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,

Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,

streaming with hatred in the heat

as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin

to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,

and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.

August,

you’re just an erotic hallucination,

just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,

are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,

this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,

the bogus moon of tenderness and magic

you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

The Tube Train — Cyril E. Power

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S.D. Chrostowska’s Permission (Book Acquired, 8.10.2013)

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Sylwia Chrostowska’s novel Permission—got it in the mail on Saturday. I’d been swimming in the river, in the relentless August sun, for most of the day, and when I got home I just wanted to watch a film and drink some wine and pass out.

But I started reading. And reading. And then I looked up and and I was like fifty pages in.

Here’s publisher Dalkey Archive’s blurb:

Composed of anonymous e-mail messages sent by the author to an acclaimed visual artist over the course of a year, Permission is the record of an experiment: an attempt to forge a connection with a stranger through the writing of a book. Part meditation, part narrative, part essay, it is presented to its addressee as a gift that asks for no thanks or acknowledgment—but what can be given in words, and what received?Permission not only updates the “epistolary novel” by embracing the permissiveness we associate with digital communication, it opens a new literary frontier.

And here’s novelist Teju Cole’s blurb, from the back of the book (for some reason not posted at Dalkey):

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Permission’s central premise (if such a work so soaked in deconstruction could be said to have a center) immediately recalled to me Jacques Derrida’s discussions of the paradox of giving:

To rephrase my experimental question: can I give away what is inalienable from me (my utterance, myself) without the faintest expectation or hope of authority, solidarity, reciprocity? Can my giving be unhinged from a sense of both investment and pointless expenditure?

The first few “chapters” — the narrator’s weekly missives to the unnamed artist — are thoroughly soaked in deconstruction and continental philosophy; this is a novel that cites Blanchot and Deleuze in its first twenty pages. However, the narrator promises that her book, “through its progressive dissolution, towards the final solution of this writing (my work) . . . becomes progressively less difficult, less obscure.”

This promise seems true, as subsequent passages flow into personal memory, reflection—storytelling. We get a brief tour of cemeteries, a snapshot of the narrator’s father (as a child) at a child’s funeral, a recollection of the narrator’s first clumsy foray into fiction writing, a miniature memoir of a failed painter, color theory, the sun, the moon.

Strange and lovely stuff. More when I finish.

Creation of the World — Remedios Varo

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“I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex” — Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Goya’s Lover — Walasse Ting

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“You’ve Got Worms” and Other Images from Anton Chekhov’s Note-Books

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* * * * *

The French say: “Laid comme un chenille”—as ugly as a caterpillar.

* * * * *

People are bachelors or old maids because they rouse no interest, not even a physical one.

* * * * *

The children growing up talked at meals about religion and laughed at fasts, monks, etc. The old mother at first lost her temper, then, evidently getting used to it, only smiled, but at last she told the children that they had convinced her, that she is now of their opinion. The children felt awkward and could not imagine what their old mother would do without her religion.

* * * * *

There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

* * * * *

The dog walked in the street and was ashamed of its crooked legs.

* * * * *

The difference between man and woman: a woman, as she grows old gives herself up more and more to female affairs; a man, as he grows old, withdraws himself more and more from female affairs.

* * * * *

That sudden and ill-timed love-affair may be compared to this: you take boys somewhere for a walk; the walk is jolly and interesting—and suddenly one of them gorges himself with oil paint.

* * * * *

The character in the play says to every one: “You’ve got worms.” He cures his daughter of the worms, and she turns yellow.

* * * * *

–From Anton Chekhov’s Note-Books.

Inside a Tent in the Canadian Rockies — John Singer Sargent

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