Coffee looks pretty much like coffee. But is Caffee a valid variant of the word coffee? And which other spelling is not a spelling mistake or typo?
We can state: Coffee is coffee. And only in this spelling is coffee really also coffee, the umbrella term for the valued beverage. Perhaps it's due to too little coffee or caffeine that typos regularly creep into the word coffee. Although caffeine is really only spelled with one "e" and coffee is always spelled with two.
Kaffe, Caffee, Cafee or Kafi? A near miss is usually a miss. We probably owe the nicest variants to other languages. So let's examine the term more closely and consult the Duden and the dictionary.
Spelling error or not entirely wrong?
Coffee in the German language stands for both the beverage and coffee in bean form. This is also how the Duden summarizes it. In addition to roasted coffee beans, it also names some coffee beverages such as espresso or mocha as a synonym. However, this is not particularly useful because, strictly speaking, these are subgroups and cannot be used synonymously. Roasted coffee can also be used synonymously in German-speaking areas.
Coffee is the kernel of the fruit of the coffee plant, which is processed and dried in the country of origin and roasted and brewed before consumption. The scientific and Latin name is Coffea, with which we have already found one origin for the frequently used "C" in coffee in other languages.
Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora are species. Coffea canephora var. robusta describes the variety Robusta. Species and variety are written in lowercase, only the genus gets a capital letter.
Caffè, Café and Coffeeshop
Caffè is the Italian word for coffee. Because coffee is the epitome of culture and daily life in Italy, a fixed part of meetings, breaks and conversations, many an Italian has the feeling he invented coffee. Incidentally, Caffè in Italy is synonymous with what we call espresso in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. If you order a Caffè in Italy, you shouldn't expect a "long" and large drink here, but rather the small cup with dense espresso under a layer of crema.
Café in turn is the French variant of the word, which has become established over time in German-speaking areas as a synonym for the coffeehouse or coffee parlor or coffee tavern. We like the variant "Café" for coffeehouse, as it was a meeting place for poets and thinkers in France and a breeding ground for the French Revolution.
Coffee in turn is the English variant. Although you don't get coffee in every coffeeshop in every country. In the Netherlands, entering a coffeeshop could lead you to a legal sales outlet for soft drugs. Some might argue at this point that coffee, thanks to the alkaloid caffeine, is nothing else.
Colloquial language, dialect and real errors
As is well known, you can speak as you like. Especially since dialects and local languages have their own rules. That's why "Kafi" or "Kaffi" in Switzerland is absolutely correct and the North German doesn't do anything wrong with "Kafe". By the way, that's not far from the Turkish kahve, which was etymologically a trailblazer for term development. The Ottoman Empire had once distributed coffee throughout the world via its trade routes.
Real mistakes remain mistakes: Kaffe, Caffee and Cafee are not found in any dictionary. They are what they look like, namely typos on the way to coffee.
The starting point for coffee's journey was the region "Kaffa" in the southwest of Ethiopia, the home of wild Arabica. Coffea canephora, on the other hand, comes from West and Central Africa, so "all coffee plants" don't come from Kaffa. Linguistically, the circle would be nicely closed with Kaffa, but the derivation isn't entirely clean: the Duden traces coffee back through the French café and Italian caffè to Turkish kahve and further to Arabic qahwa. The similarity to Kaffa is therefore more of a pleasant coincidence than the root of the word.
