Sir James Murray, in the New English Dictionary, believed that the origin of the English word "coffee" is connected with the name Kaffa, a town in Shoa, southwest Abyssinia (Ethopia) which is the reputed native place of the coffee plant. However there is little evidence to support this connection because the the berry or plant is called "bunn" in Arabic with a different word being used to describe the drink. Sir James Murray also draws attention to the existence of two European origins for the word "coffee", one like the French café and Italian caffè, the other like the Dutch koffie.
Virendranath Chattopádhyáya, who also contributed to the New English Dictionary's Notes and Queries symposium, argued that thehw of the Arabic qahwah sometimes becomes ff or only f or v in European translations because some languages, such as English, have strong syllabic accents (stresses), while others, like 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 while Sir Thomas Herbert in his folio about his travels in Africa (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.
According to The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, European languages, generally appear to have got the name from the Turkish "kahveh", about 1600, through the Italian term "caffe". "Kahveh" is the Turkish pronounciation of the Arabic name "qahwah" which originally meant 'a sort of wine' and is a derivative of the verb "qahiya" (meaning - to have no appetite).
With Courtesy from Peter Baskerville
No comments:
Post a Comment