Archives for: April 2009, 28

Кофе

April 28th, 2009 by Don

The Russian word for coffee is кофе. It's an indeclinable noun, which means it never changes its ending for case or number. Despite the ending, it's a masculine noun, not a neuter one. In other words, one is supposed to say чёрный кофе, not чёрное кофе. There is a reason for that: the word used to be кофей, which is clearly masculine. In fact, if you read Crime and Punishment in Russian, you will still find it spelled that way.

You know how in English data is supposed to be plural, but everyone uses it as a singular form? That is, we are supposed to say “These data are interesting,” but in fact we usually say “This data is interesting”? The Russians are in a similar situation with the word кофе. Theoretically it's masculine, but it's incredibly common to hear it as a neuter. The error is so widespread that it has spawned a well-known joke:

К буфетчице постоянно подходили покупатели, которые просили одно кофе. At the snackbar customers would constantly ask the clerk for одно coffee.
Каждый раз она с досадой думала: Each time she would get irritated and think:
«Что за безграмотность! “What illiteracy!
Хоть бы раз в жизни услышать нормальное один кофе.» Just once in my life I'd like to hear a proper один кофе.
Вдруг к ней обращается иностранец: Suddenly a foreigner walks up to her and says:
«Мне, пожалуйста, один кофе…». I'd like один coffee, please…”
Буфетчица с удивлённой радостью смотрит на него, The clerk looks at him with surprise and joy,
и он добавляет: «…и один булочка.» and then he adds “and один sweet roll.”

The last line is funny because in that context a Russian will say одна булочка; thus the foreigner accidentally got the grammatically tricky point right, but then he slaughtered the Russian language by making a mistake that no native speaker, not even the least educated, would ever make.

This joke is retold all over Russia in a thousand variations where the customer changes: often he's a Georgian because the Georgian accent is well known and commonly mocked, sometimes a Russian, sometimes a foreigner, and the jokes are sometimes written with funky Russian spelling to portray his non-Russian accent.

Update 2009-09-02: As of yesterday a decree of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science went into effect that affirms several dictionaries as normative for Russian as the official language of the Russian government. Those dictionaries acknowledge that кофе can be treated as neuter, so in a sense it is now officially acceptable to say чёрное кофе. The dictionaries include:

  • "Орфографический словарь русского языка" Б.Букчиной, И.Сазоновой и Л.Чельцовой
  • "Грамматический словарь русского языка" под редакцией А.Зализняка
  • "Словарь ударений русского языка" И.Резниченко
  • "Большой фразеологический словарь русского языка" с комментарием В.Телия

Posted in Jokes, Beverages | 3 comments »