![]() ![]() ![]() This mountain is called Nasmarde (Nakīl Sumāra), where all the cohoo grows.” Farther on was “a little village, where there is sold cohoo and fruite. On May 28, 1609, he records that “in the afternoone wee departed out of Hatch (Al-Hauta, the capital of the Lahej district near Aden), and travelled untill three in the morninge, and then wee rested in the plaine fields untill three the next daie, neere unto a cohoo howse in the desert.” On June 5 the party, traveling from Hippa (Ibb), “laye in the mountaynes, our camells being wearie, and our selves little better. This is John Jourdain, a Dorsetshire seaman, whose Diary was printed by the Hakluyt Society in 1905. Prideaux then calls, as a witness to the Anglo-Arabic pronunciation, one whose evidence was not available when the New English Dictionary and Hobson-Jobson articles were written. ![]() 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:Ĭhaoua 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 called Caphe and Cahua.” Here the Persian, Turkish, and Arabic pronunciations are clearly differentiated.Ĭol. Most Europeans tend to leave it out altogether.Ĭol. Again, he points out that the surd aspirate h is heard in some languages, but is hardly audible in others. 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. Sir James Murray makes no attempt to solve this problem. Many must wonder how the hv of the original so persistently becomes ff in the European equivalents. The Scandinavian languages have adopted the French form. The Germans have corrected their koffee, which they may have got from the Dutch, into kaffee. It is clear that the French type is more correct. I judge that Dutch koffie and kindred forms are imperfect attempts at the notation of a vowel which the writers could not grasp. 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. The change from a to o, in my opinion, is better accounted for as an imperfect appreciation. 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. He explains the vowel o in the second series as apparently representing au, from Turkish ahv. Sir James Murray draws attention to the existence of two European types, one like the French café, Italian caffè, the other like the English coffee, Dutch koffie. The Turkish form might have been written kahvé, as its final h was never sounded at any time. 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.Ĭontributing to a symposium on the etymology of the word coffee in Notes and Queries, 1909, James Platt, Jr., said: 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. The European languages got the name of the beverage about 1600 from the original Arabic qahwah, not directly, but through its Turkish form, kahveh. THE history of the word coffee involves several phonetic difficulties. Origin and translation of the word from the Arabian into various languages-Views of many writers ![]() DEALING WITH THE ETYMOLOGY OF COFFEE - from William H. ![]()
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