When and why “delicious coffee” will be considered the norm, not a mistake

History of "coffee" in Russian

For the first time this word was used Elephants and coffee: someone else's as their own / K. A. Bogdanov. About crocodiles in Russia. Essays from the history of borrowings and exoticisms in 1665 in a recipe that a doctor wrote out to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Moreover, the doctor mentioned "coffee" in a neuter gender: "Boiled coffee, known by the Persians and Turks, and usually taken after dinner, is a hefty remedy for arrogance, runny nose and headache."

The Russian National Corpus provides Coffee / Russian National Corpus with examples of the word's use from the early 18th century. Since 1734 we find the Kofiy / National Russian Corpus a variant of “Kofiy”, and since 1743 we find Kofiy / National Russian Corpus and “Coffee”. That is, the borrowed name of the drink on Russian soil received additional forms that were masculine.

By itself, "coffee" was also used both in the neuter gender and in the masculine - there were fluctuations from the very beginning of the use of this word, this is not a feature of modernity. On the one hand, in Dutch, German and French, it is a masculine noun. And the Russian nobles, who knew European languages well, probably carried this characteristic into their native language. At least in the 19th century, the masculine gender was predominant.

On the other hand, the middle one did not disappear anywhere, because the form of the word asks for it. In Russian, nouns that end in "e" usually refer to the neuter gender: "field", "blade", "cafe" (by the way, a relative of Cafe / M. Fasmer. Etymological dictionary of the Russian language of our hero). And the word "coffee" in its characteristics should also be likened to them. Native speakers feel this, and therefore use it in the neuter gender.

"Coffee" as a neuter noun was used by the writers Andrei Bely and Alexei Tolstoy. In the work of Mikhail Bulgakov "Notes of a Dead Man (Theatrical Novel)" there is such a sentence: "There was coffee in a cup on the desk." And Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky used both masculine and neuter gender. The heroes of Nabokov's novel "The King, Lady, Jack" drink "morning coffee", and in the Russian translation of "Lolita" the author himself approved the version of "morning coffee".

What dictionaries say

In 1909, V. Dolopchev's "Experience of the Dictionary of Irregularities in Russian Colloquial Speech" was published, which says that "coffee" should be neuter, and masculine is illiteracy. However, this point of view did not take root in educated circles: the tradition turned out to be too strong.

Most modern reference books say that this is a masculine noun. However, despite all the indignation of the Grammar-Nazi, some dictionaries write that "coffee" in colloquial speech can be Coffee / Spelling academic resource "ACADEMOS" of the Institute of the Russian Language. VV Vinogradov RAS to be neuter. That is, in a casual conversation, this is no longer a mistake.

Many may be indignant: they say, this is all modern philologists have invented, but before people were more literate, you will not find such an outrage in old dictionaries. Well, Ushakov's dictionary says Coffee / Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, ed. DN Ushakova is the same, and this is one of the oldest authoritative sources.

What will happen next

“Coffee” has “brothers” - words that were also once masculine, but because of their phonetic appearance have moved into the middle category: “cocoa”, “piano”, “coat”, “metro”. Yes, “it's time for me to drink my National Corpus of the Russian Cocoa Language” by Turgenev, “our old National Corpus of the Russian Language for the Piano” by Leskov, “it had a light green National Corpus of the Russian Language Coat” by Herzen - these are not the oddities of the classics. And once upon a time there was a newspaper "Soviet Metro". However, native speakers rightly sensed the neuter gender in these words.

Coffee tends to do the same. Now a lot of attention is drawn to this word, and the use of the masculine form has become an indicator of literacy, which artificially restrains the natural change of gender. Most likely, it will happen, but when it depends on the activity of the purists. Today, in a colloquial context, neuter gender is acceptable, but in official speech masculine is still considered the only norm.