Yesterday, my wife and I had lunch in a coffee shop/café whose name is rendered
JEZ
OVE
with the O as a stylised coffee bean. My linguistic analysis never completely stops, and I asked the waitress how this is pronounced. She said “Jez-ve”, so that’s not an O after all, but simply a stylised coffee bean. I then asked her what it means, and she said she didn’t know, but she’d ask the manager. If she did, she didn’t return to tell me, so I had to do some research when I got home. (What did people do before the internet?) If you don’t know, can you remotely guess?
The internet showed me this page: a Turkish coffeepot with a long handle, from Turkish cezve, also spelled gezve, from Arabic. Wikipedia’s page on Turkish shows that c is pronounced the same as English j. I’m not sure that it qualifies as an ‘English’ word.
I wonder how many people know the word, or if they don’t, bother to ask about the pronunciation, or what it means.
I found the café’s website and tried to download the logo but couldn’t so I’ll link to it. I thoroughly recommend the fish and chips, but the coffee cup was a bit small for my liking. There are bigger smalls than that.
By the way, Pages for Mac red-underlines both cezve and gezve, after first autocorrecting the first to crave, which might be appropriate with regard to coffee, and the second to geese, which probably isn’t. It also autocorrects jezve to heave, which isn’t for one meaning of heave.
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 