Talk:kahvi

Wouldn't this word have possibly come from Turkish kahve, since the word is spelled more similar to that? Dragonman9001 (talk) 11:23, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Well I think so as well, especially when you look at Hungarian, which borrowed heavily from Turkish and is related to Finnish. Sure, they split up ages ago, but it's still plausible to assume a borrowing through an intermediary language whose structure is closer to your language, the same way some Slavic languages can borrow from one another, when the ultimate origin is English, for example.

The pronunciation is closer to the Turkish as well. A Swedish intermediary would indeed make more sense historically, but it's not like Hungarian is an absurd option and was spoken on another continent.~~

Edit: Tried posting this to Wiktionary:Etymology_scriptorium, but was flagged as vandalism, I guess the algorithm works in mysterious ways.

No. The most likely path this word took is Finnish kahvi < Swedish kaffe < Italian caffè < Ottoman Turkish قهوه‎ (kahve) (< Persian قهوه)? < Arabic قَهْوَة‎ (qahwa). — surjection ⟨??⟩ 11:53, 1 January 2021 (UTC)