Coffee/Cafe

[bnjtokyo]

I am surprised to see neither "coffee" nor "cafe" as been discussed.

I have long since heard of Kaldi, the goat herd, in what is now Ethiopia who observed his goats getting frisky after eating fresh coffee beans and who then decided to try them himself. (NB "Kaldi" is now the name of a chain of shops in Japan selling coffee beans and several other mostly non-Japanese food stuffs such as rösti, dill pickles and olive oil.) The story goes on to say Kaldi took the beans to a local priest who declared the beans to be the devil's work and threw them in the fire but the rich aroma of freshly roasted coffee filled the room. The priest then ordered that hot water be poured over the roasted beans to preserve the aroma and then somehow decided to try the resulting brew. Anyway, all this is supposed to have occurred near the city of Kaffa in Ethiopia, "kaffa" became "kahva" in Arabic and that became "cafe" or "kafe" and finally both "coffee" and "cafe" courtesy of the Ottoman Empire.

So is "coffee" ultimately an eponym? Or must an eponym be derived from the name of a person?

[Slava]

I think coffee would be a toponym.

Fun tale of how coffee came to be. I see that coffee in Kaffa is būno, which in Arabic became bunn, as in the coffee maker brand. I never knew.