It is difficult to meet a person who is not familiar with the divine taste of coffee. The love of this drink unites many, especially in the morning. But among people who are savvy in grammar, the debate about coffee does not subside: what kind of drink is this in Russian?
Coffee appearance
Is coffee one or one? It has long been believed that this drink in the Russian language is masculine. For the first time in Russia, coffee appeared under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. There is a mention that his court physician, a foreigner, prescribed coffee to the king with slight ailments - “against arrogance, runny nose and headaches”. In the olden days, it was not a feeling, but a feeling of a bloated abdomen.
History is silent whether the tsar liked the proposed drug or not, but we know for sure that his son Peter I, during his stay in Holland, loved coffee very much: in the development of coffee culture, Western Europe was ahead of Russia by a couple of centuries. The Pope even blessed coffee so that pious Christians would not be afraid of God's wrath and sinful influence of the “black blood of the Turks,” as the worried clergy called this drink.
Returning and becoming king, Peter I tried to introduce the use of coffee as a regular habit among the Russian nobility. By his order, coffee was served even at the entrance to the museum opened by Peter, the Kunstkamera. But just as coffee had previously aroused distrust in Europe, so now it has happened in Russia. Given that the appearance of coffee was accompanied by the introduction of many other reforms of Peter I, ordinary people reacted to it with great suspicion. But the royal family liked the coffee - judging by the evidence, both Anna Ioannovna and Peter III loved it.
It took another century to make coffee finally fell in love with the masses. In the 19th century, coffee shops were opened throughout St. Petersburg, and fortunetellers even appeared on coffee grounds. And in the XX century, during the USSR, coffee in Russia became a deficit. Real coffee was available to the families of the party nomenclature, and substitutes from chicory or barley appeared on store shelves. But now Russia is one of the countries that use the most coffee.
Is coffee one or one?
We remember that coffee is from the school bench. There is even a joke about this: “It happens, you will try coffee and you understand that“ it is ”. A delicious and noble drink simply must be masculine.
But there is another version. The masculine form was inherent in the word “coffee” when it was only part of the everyday life of Russians. Then there was no question how to say - one or one coffee - the drink was called coffee, coffee or coffe. But like many borrowed words in the Russian language, it acquired the ending “-e”. The grammatical norms for the use of the word coffee were officially established in 1956 and have not changed for a long time. However, in 2009, the Ministry of Education decided that coffee can now also be consumed in the form of a middle gender.
Changes to the rules for the use of the word “coffee”
Which gender - male or middle - do dictionaries now offer? Most books mention that according to grammar standards the word “coffee” is masculine, but at the same time they supplement this thesis with the remark that people increasingly use this word in the form of a neuter gender. “Coffee is it” has already become a partial norm, at least at the level of spoken language. The masculine gender is considered the main, and the middle - additional.
Those of philologists who advocate the use of the word “coffee” in the form of a neuter gender, motivate their point of view by the fact that language is a volatile phenomenon. The natural processes of evolution and transformation of verbal forms are taking place, and what happened with the word "coffee" is a wonderful illustration of such a change.
Coffee is like a plant
But in the case when we are talking not about the drink, but about the coffee tree, the question “one or one coffee” should not arise. An evergreen coffee plant is always it.