The origin of the drink, due to the kind of name of which many copies were broken in Russian linguistic forums, is not known at the moment. It is believed that in the first millennium AD, a shepherd in Ethiopia used the fruits of a coffee plant to prepare an invigorating broth, based on observations of the excited behavior of goats that consumed coffee beans.
About what kind of word "coffee" was in the Ethiopian language of that time, and whether there was any name at all, is unknown. But it is assumed that it came from the name of the Kaffa region, where the aforementioned plants grew. It was from here that they were probably brought to Arabia, where the drink was called "kahwa," which means "driving away dreams." From the Middle East, the broth began its sensational procession to Europe. In the XV-XVI centuries it was tried in Italy and France. Here he became known as "caffe" and "cafe", respectively. It is interesting that on Italian soil the first tasting took place in the palace of
the pope himself. There were periods of persecution when the drink was banned as a “devilish potion”.
If you want to know what kind of word "coffee" is in European languages, then we inform you - almost everywhere is masculine. On Russian soil, there is debate about the belonging of this term to the middle or masculine gender.
And some foreign linguists may not understand this problem at all, because their language contains only masculine and feminine gender (French, Spanish, Italian, Bengali, Sanskrit, Hindi), middle and general gender (a group of Scandinavian languages), or gender in general absent (English, Finnish, Turkic, Korean, Chinese, Mongolian, Armenian, etc.). We have a question, what kind of word "coffee", presumably, arose due to the fact that it (in accordance with world trends) is attributed to the masculine gender, despite the end of the "e", more appropriate to the average, as well as recommendations to use without declensions.
Coffee as a product was distributed in Russia only during the time of Peter the Great, when the whole world was already familiar with this drink. Therefore, it was called “kefa”, and “coffee”, and “coffee”, and “kokhei”, transferring Western or Eastern terms into Russian. In many works of the classics of past centuries, you can find phrases that "someone has eaten some coffee." This is the second possible reason to call the genus “coffee” in the modern language as masculine, following the great creators of the literary field.
Some publications determine the use of words colloquial and strictly literary norm. According to dictionaries and linguistic materials of the 70–80s. The twentieth century, the answer to the question of what kind of word “coffee” is that colloquial use of this concept is acceptable in the middle gender, however, according to strict rules, it has always been related to the masculine gender.
The experts of St. Petersburg University, who in the new dictionary delicately circumvented this problem, but confirmed that at the moment it was precisely established what kind of “coffee” adhere to the same opinion. Male. But in the future it is possible that it will pass into the neuter genus along with “cocoa”.