Two new foreign words: Turkish kahvalti and French pavé
« previous post | next post »
I probably learn at least one or two new foreign words per day, and they always delight me no end.
The first new foreign word I learned today is Turkish kahvalti (lit., "before coffee) which means "breakfast".
Inherited from Ottoman Turkish قهوه آلتی (ḳahve altı, “food taken before coffee; especially breakfast or lunch”), from قهوه (ḳahve) and آلت (alt), equivalent to kahve (“coffee”) + alt (“under, lower, below”) + -ı (possessive suffix), literally “under coffee”. (Wiktionary)
This tells us how important coffee is in Turkish life.
The second new foreign word I learned today is French pavé, lit., "paving block; cobblestone". Here's how it came to my attention.
For the last year and a half, I have been carrying around — including to Korea, London, Belfast, across the United States, down the Mississippi — a very heavy book that I was commissioned to review for the French Sinological journal, T'oung Pao. I thought that surely, in the midst of all that travelling, I'd be able to knock of the review of Étienne de la Vaissière's 648 pp. Asie centrale 300-850. Des routes et des royaumes. Although I had written about one third of the review within the first two weeks after I received the big book from the T'oung Pao editorial office, i just couldn't finish it off for the next year. Finally, when the new academic year began at Penn, I said to myself, "This is just too humiliating. If I don't finish off the review within one week, it'll drag on for another year." So I sat down and cranked out the review, and am very relived to have done so.
When I sent in the review, the book review editor, Isabelle Ang, exclaimed, "It is a 'pavé', so it’s totally understandable that you needed a lot of time to write it!"
I knew immediately and instinctively what she meant by that, since I myself had grown accustomed to saying to others who would ask about that big book, "It's a brick".
Every time I learn a new word, especially a foreign word, I feel smarter.
Selected readings
- "Massive borrowing" (2/18/19)
- "Borrowability" (1/10/09)
CuConnacht said,
September 13, 2025 @ 3:24 pm
"Sous les pavés, la plage!" (under the paving stones, the beach) was a slogan of the student demonstrators during les évènements de mai '68 perhaps with reference to the practice of some of them of prying up the paving stones to hurl at the police and the CRS.
Ron Irving said,
September 13, 2025 @ 3:58 pm
It's a well-known term in cycling. One of the most famous one-day races, Paris-Roubaix, is known as the Hell of the North due to its pavé sections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris–Roubaix
Barbara Phillips Long said,
September 13, 2025 @ 4:30 pm
Pavé (often pave) is a common term in jewelry design, referring to surface areas filled with many small stones. Pavé can be used in wider surfaces, but can also be used to cover much of a narrow ring’s surface, setting the stones in a channel.
Quote:
In the modern day, pave has become nearly the standard method of setting diamonds onto metal in jewelry. Pavé, (pronounced pah-veh) is a french word that means “pavement” as in a cobblestone paved street. Pave in jewelry is very beautiful because very little metal is visible especially in certain styles of pave. There are a myriad of pave styles to choose from, some flavors resemble one another while others create a drastically different look to a design.
https://victorcanera.com/education/jewelry/pave-styles
Philip Anderson said,
September 13, 2025 @ 5:22 pm
If food is eaten before coffee, is coffee that important?
To me, pavé means a type of bread, one which is indeed shaped like a paving stone.
Coby said,
September 13, 2025 @ 7:30 pm
Pavé is also a thick steak.
In Brazilian Portuguese, breakfast is café da manhã (morning coffee).
Anthony Bruck said,
September 13, 2025 @ 8:21 pm
Turkish for 'brown' is kahve rengi (renk='color').
David Morris said,
September 13, 2025 @ 9:44 pm
Lunch before coffee? Or, to put it another way, no coffee until after lunch?
Bob Ladd said,
September 14, 2025 @ 1:11 am
"This tells us how important coffee is in Turkish life."
I've long been a fan of Turkish-style coffee, and actually, what struck me when I was travelling around Turkey 50 years ago was that everyone mostly drank tea.
cameron said,
September 14, 2025 @ 1:56 am
@Anthony Bruck – qahve, which literally means coffee, is also the name for the color brown in Persian and Kurdish
cameron said,
September 14, 2025 @ 2:02 am
I should clarify my previous comment. it's not the case that qahve, meaning coffee in Persian and Kurdish, literally also means "brown". rather, the word for brown is qahvei, literally coffee-ish. but that's splitting a pretty fine hair
AntC said,
September 14, 2025 @ 2:47 am
pavé is typically translated 'paving stones'. But that usually means (in BritE) something several square feet in area, and needing at least two people to maneuvre in to place.
So utter confusion in the reporting during the 1968 Student riots in Paris. How could you "throw" something that heavy? And how would it not just drop on your feet, let alone reach as far as a line of police?
Philip Taylor said,
September 14, 2025 @ 3:35 am
Bob — "I've long been a fan of Turkish-style coffee, and actually, what struck me when I was travelling around Turkey 50 years ago was that everyone mostly drank tea" — I had a similar experience in Athens, asking for a Greek coffee in a Greek coffee shop and being told "Sorry, we serve only 'normal' coffee, not Greek" !
Pavle Lux said,
September 14, 2025 @ 4:53 am
In Luxembourgish "Kaffi drénken" means to have breakfast.
And one of the few northern English terms my children have got from me is "having tea" when we eat at around 6 pm.
http://www.dico.lu/dictionnaire.php?m=Kaffi+dr%C3%A9nken
Victor Mair said,
September 14, 2025 @ 6:50 am
From Michael Carasik:
A fun footnote about coffee language. In Modern Hebrew, coffee is קפה café. But the great Hebrew writer of two generations ago, S. Y. Agnon, had ideas of his own about the language, and always used קהווה kahva, adopting (or perhaps slightly Hebraizing) the Turkish word.
Bob Ladd said,
September 14, 2025 @ 9:31 am
"In Luxembourgish "Kaffi drénken" means to have breakfast."
In Dutch, "koffie drinken" can mean "to have lunch (in company)", though I'm pretty sure this usage is now thoroughly old-fashioned.
Also: Greek is another language in which kafé (καφέ) can mean brown.
Robert Coren said,
September 14, 2025 @ 9:39 am
Color names that are (or are derived from) the name of an object or substance that is that color are pretty common; in English we have (at least) orange, rose, pink, violet, gold, silver, and probably others that are not coming to me off the top of my head.
CuConnacht said,
September 14, 2025 @ 9:54 am
Arabic has بني, bunni = brown, literally the color of coffee beans.
Coby said,
September 14, 2025 @ 1:37 pm
In several varieties of Spanish (especially Mexican), café is also the word for brown. (Other words include pardo, marrón, carmelita.)
When one orders un café in Colombia, by the way, one gets a large cup filled with more milk than coffee. Just plain (black) coffee is tinto (which in Spain means red wine).
ajay said,
September 15, 2025 @ 5:55 am
"I've long been a fan of Turkish-style coffee, and actually, what struck me when I was travelling around Turkey 50 years ago was that everyone mostly drank tea"
Also my experience. And bad tea, at that. Either horribly overbrewed black tea or sickeningly sweet instant "apple tea". It becomes particularly obvious if you spend a long time on a coach in Turkey that, even though the country has given its name to two things which are famous worldwide – the Turkish bath and Turkish coffee – the actual inhabitants seem to make very little use of either.
Robert Coren: thank you! Today I learned that pinks are not called pinks because pinks are pink, but pink is called pink because pinks are pink.
ajay said,
September 15, 2025 @ 5:56 am
I like "pave" for a heavy book because it has the implication that this is also a book which you can metaphorically throw at your opponents.
Stephen Cash said,
September 15, 2025 @ 9:31 am
Pavé is also used, in some of the more sophisticated restaurant kitchens in America (I don't know about France), to refer to a potato dish made by layering very thin slices of potato with flavorings and usually some kind of dairy, then baking it and pressing it under weight. Then it is cut into portions which can be served as is, or seared on a griddle, or even deep-fried. It is basically an impressively-presented potato gratin.
Francois Lang said,
September 15, 2025 @ 10:35 am
If you're ever in midtown NYC, be sure to check out Pavé:
https://www.pave46.com/
Their Brioche with Passionfruit filling is sensational!
FML