The Armchair Linguist

Kafetzou - What's in a name?

My screen name, Kafetzou, was born of an incident at Balkan Camp many years ago, but I won't get into that now. What I will get into is the word itself. It's a Greek word, and it means "the woman who reads the coffee grounds" - that's me. But how did it come into being?

It started with the Arabic word "qahwe", meaning coffee. Presumably, this word originally came from Amharic, as we know that coffee originated in Ethiopia. "Qahwe" passed into Turkish as "kahve", since Turkish does not have the two different guttural stops that Arabic has (qaf & kaf) - it only has the one, "k", and it uses "v" to represent the missing "w" sound (that's how the Arabic "wa" (="and") became "ve" in Turkish).

In Turkish, the word also obtained the suffix "-ci", pronounced like "gee" in English, meaning one who has some kind of professional dealing with the thing, either as a seller, maker, or some other purveyor. Thus, a taksici is a taxi driver, and a fotokopici is a guy who makes photocopies (for others). A kahveci was probably usually a coffee seller, as in the brandname of Turkish coffee most often found in North America, "Kahveci Mehmet Effendi".

This word in turn passed into Greek, becoming "kafetzis", with the same meaning. This is because Greek does not have the sound /dzh/, as in the initial and final sounds of the English word "judge" (or the Turkish suffix "-ci"), so it substitutes the two sounds "tz". "Kafetzou" is the genitive of the same word. To make most names and some professions feminine in Greek, one need only use the genitive. Thus, "papadopoulos" is the offspring of the "papas" or priest, and a woman with this last name would be called "papadopoulou". A person who does things with passion is a "meraklis" from the Turkish word "merak", meaning curiosity, which curiously became passion in Greek. A woman who does things with passion is a "meraklou".

One other interesting note: In Greek, not all professions work like this. For example, the male doctor is "o giatros", and the female doctor is "h giatros" (where "h" represents the Greek letter "eta"), the only difference being the gender of the article. But I digress.

At any rate, that is the explanation of my screen name.

posted by Laura Blumenthal @ 11:58 p.m.