By Anatoly Liberman
All sources inform us about the Arabic-Turkish home of the word coffee, though in the European languages some forms were taken over directly from Arabic, so that the etymological part of the relevant entry in dictionaries and encyclopedias needs modification. There is a possibility of coffee being connected with the name of the kingdom of Kaffa, but this question need not bother us at the moment. The main puzzle is the development of the form coffee rather than its distant origin. The OED is, as always, helpful, but particularly instructive is the array of variants found in a book with the funny title Hobson-Jobson. Far from being a book of humor, it is a wonderful dictionary of Anglo-Indian words. In its pages we find recollections about a very good drink called Chaube (1573), Caova (1580), cohoo (1609) and, surprisingly for such an early date, coffee (also 1609), cahue (1615), coho, and copha (1628). The route to Europe is supposed to be from Arabic quahwa via Turkish kahveh. Later coffee became the standard form in English. But, as we can see, there was no real progression: in 1609 some people said cohoo, while others already knew coffee. The cause may be that the Arabic and the Persian pronunciations competed, one being prevalent on the coast of Arabia, the other in the mercantile towns. The writers quoted above were mainly English, Dutch, French, and Italian. All of them recorded the foreign word according to their speech habits, though some may have repeated what they had heard from their countrymen. (Incidentally, the transliteration of the Turkish word as kahveh and the Arabic as qahwah may not be quite right, for the so-called round gaf of the Turkish word, as this consonant is known among the Anglo-Indians, sounds very much like Arabic q. I would be grateful to specialists for either corroborating or refuting this statement. Perhaps there are dialectal differences of which I am unaware.)
Several researchers wondered how hw could become f. This, I think, is less of an enigma than many people think. The opposite change of f to hv (with a guttural h, that is, kh, approximately as in German ach and Dutch Schipol) often occurs in non-standard Russian. At one time, the consonant f was alien to it, and names like Filip (stress on the second syllable) turned into Khvilip. The same substitution still happens in Russian dialects. To produce the consonant f, one needs a passage of air (otherwise, the result will be p) and active lips (or at least an active lower lip). The group hv satisfies both conditions, except that breath and the lips participate in its production consecutively instead of concurrently, as happens in f. Since, as a general rule, seventeenth-century Europeans could not pronounce hw or hv, they combined both elements of articulation in one sound and ended up with f. Its voiced partner v fits the situation even better, and we should applaud the man who wrote caova. Chaube (that is, khaube) is a close relative of caova, because b is also a labial sound. Some speakers were lazy and left out w altogether; hence cohoo and its likes. For comparison, one may cite Finnish kahvi and Polish kawa.
The vowels give us grief too. Both Arabic and Turkish have a in the first syllable, while the English word has o. The Dutch for coffee is also koffie, as opposed, for instance, to German K