A drink by any other name

[W'rkncacnter]

I just found this link - The History of Coffee: The Story Of Civilization In A Cup - which mentions 7000 BC (citation needed).

That definitely does not match what Wikipedia says about the history of coffee, which says the earliest records are about 1000 AD. History of coffee - Wikipedia

i mean, i wouldn't exactly call wikipedia reliable. that doesn't make that other source reliable, but still...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

i wouldn't exactly call wikipedia reliable

Wikipedia is generally sourced, and thus as reliable as the sources, for the most part.

In the hierarchy of reliability, that makes it say, much more reliable than, for example, the New York Times, which no only has un-sourced stories, but continues to keep stories up when they've been conclusively debunked with only pathetic "updates" which are more shadow than light. Or indeed most news services or TV shows.

Sometimes it isn't sourced, or the sources are terrible, but usually see that really easily by looking at what the sources (if any) are. Again, this means it's actually more reliable than most things. I'd say in general, at this point in history, it's typically far more reliable than any other source you're just going to find with a normal search engine. You usually have to get into actual academic texts to beat it.

Again, there are exceptions, but they tend to be obvious.

 

[RangerWickett]

I just figure if people were drinking something as amazing as coffee, it would be attested to in a lot of documents. The absence of that documentation suggests it had not been discovered yet.

Like, we have clay tablets from 1750 BC complaining about a business transaction - Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir - Wikipedia - and then as we get more recent there are tons of surviving artifacts. But no mention of coffee, apparently.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

Wikipedia is generally sourced, and thus as reliable as the sources, for the most part.

In the hierarchy of reliability, that makes it say, much more reliable than, for example, the New York Times, which no only has un-sourced stories, but continues to keep stories up when they've been conclusively debunked with only pathetic "updates" which are more shadow than light. Or indeed most news services or TV shows.

Sometimes it isn't sourced, or the sources are terrible, but usually see that really easily by looking at what the sources (if any) are. Again, this means it's actually more reliable than most things. I'd say in general, at this point in history, it's typically far more reliable than any other source you're just going to find with a normal search engine. You usually have to get into actual academic texts to beat it.

Again, there are exceptions, but they tend to be obvious.

i could get into a whole thing about this (i did, actually, but i deleted it), but we're talking about coffee and tea, and my point was just that wikipedia conflicting with a source doesn't necessarily mean the non-wikipedia source is wrong. i'm just gonna say "wikipedia is so heavily biased that even the founder that created its neutrality guidelines (because there's 2 different founders) thinks it's beyond hope" and leave it at that for this discussion.

I just figure if people were drinking something as amazing as coffee, it would be attested to in a lot of documents. The absence of that documentation suggests it had not been discovered yet.

that makes sense to me.

Like, we have clay tablets from 1750 BC complaining about a business transaction - Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir - Wikipedia - and then as we get more recent there are tons of surviving artifacts. But no mention of coffee, apparently.

i found a full (well, mostly) translation of that tablet, and...it's honestly pretty entertaining.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

i could get into a whole thing about this (i did, actually, but i deleted it), but we're talking about coffee and tea, and my point was just that wikipedia conflicting with a source doesn't necessarily mean the non-wikipedia source is wrong.

Sure, but you seemingly called Wikipedia generally unreliable, and if we're talking about sources on the internet, it's more reliable than almost all of them, and the general "lol u cant trust wikipedia" attitude evidenced by people who still take stuff like the WaPo or the NYT at their word is truly bizarre (and those are more trustworthy papers than most!).

i'm just gonna say "wikipedia is so heavily biased that even the founder that created its neutrality guidelines (because there's 2 different founders) thinks it's beyond hope" and leave it at that for this discussion.

That seems meaningless because the same could be said of pretty much everything produced under capitalism, communism, or whatever ideology. It's all got inherent ideological bias. And because all of Wikipedia's sources are biased, it's bound to be, for better and worse. It's nowhere near the level of bias of say, a pre-internet encyclopedia like Britannica, not even close.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

Sure, but you seemingly called Wikipedia generally unreliable, and if we're talking about sources on the internet, it's more reliable than almost all of them, and the general "lol u cant trust wikipedia" attitude evidenced by people who still take stuff like the WaPo or the NYT at their word is truly bizarre (and those are more trustworthy papers than most!).

That seems meaningless because the same could be said of pretty much everything produced under capitalism, communism, or whatever ideology. It's all got inherent ideological bias. And because all of Wikipedia's sources are biased, it's bound to be, for better and worse. It's nowhere near the level of bias of say, a pre-internet encyclopedia like Britannica, not even close.

look, dude, i seriously don't think this is the thread for this.

 

[Umbran]

I just figure if people were drinking something as amazing as coffee, it would be attested to in a lot of documents.

I may have to take this over to the Geek Confessions thread. Coffee, to me, is not amazing. It is merely highly caffeinated.

There is a reason I came into a thread about tea

 

[Tonguez]

I just figure if people were drinking something as amazing as coffee, it would be attested to in a lot of documents. The absence of that documentation suggests it had not been discovered yet.

Its likely that coffee berries were originally chewed rather thsn drunk and in some parts of Ethiopia it is still a tradition to chew coffee berries mixed with ghee, the coffee berries were also fermented into a wine. Its thought that coffee entered Arabia via sudanese merchants or slaves chewing the coffee-ghee mix to survive the desert crossing. So maybe the bitter chewed stuff wasnt so amazing and was just survival food.

The story of the goatherd, a mere 1000 yrs ago, might mark the first time Ethiopian monks roasted coffee berries in a fire, crushed them and steeped the powder in hot water creating the medicinal coffee decoction we know today. This we know was a hit, its of huge cultural importance in Ethiopia and Yemen and has spread to the world.

Interestingly the Ethiopian word for coffee is Buna and it was commonly grown in the Kingdom of Kaffa, thus in trade coffee was called Kaffa Buna eventually anglicized to Coffee Bean (rather than coffee berry)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I wouldn’t get too mired down in minutiae like this. You’re probably not linguistically minded like JRRT, and you do want your audience to understand what your characters are talking about when you mention tea/steeped herbs/drinking soups, etc. I mean, are you coming up with alternative terms for beer, wine, and other aspects of the cuisine?

I understand the desire. A few years ago, I asked ENWorlders to help me come up with a male name that had an Everyman-type quality to it. I wanted a fantasy analog to “Johnny”. And the responses I got illustrated my folly.

A common name in one culture would be rare or nonexistent in another. Some names get transmuted into other forms in different languages. Names common in past eras have been all but forgotten, as will today’s hot names at some future point.

So I went with Johnny.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

I'm writing a bronze age fantasy novel, and in a bid to stay with the aesthetic of the era, I keep running into fun challenges of world-building. My latest: tea.

Tea is a beverage made from steeping leaves of the tea plant in hot water. There are numerous other types of plant you can steep in hot water to make a tasty infusion, but these days we often call all of them 'tea' even if there are no tea leaves in them. I recall in one episode of Man vs Wild while in some frozen northern area, Bear Grylls boiled water and tossed in pine needles just to make a warm drink.

But if you were reading a novel set in a region analogous to Mesopotamia, and someone ate lasagna or a hamburger, that would take you out of the narrative, right? If they ate chocolate or potatoes (new world plants), that might fly under the radar for some, but for me it would be immersion disrupting. Sure, it's a fantasy world, so I could say that in this 'fertile crescent' region maybe cocoa grows here natively, or whatever. Maybe some famous priest invented the hamburger, and it's just called whatever the Sumerian word for 'ground beef on a bun' is. (Gur-ab-sag-ninda means grind-cow-inside-baked-good.)

But if I have a couple characters meet up and one provides a friendly drink for the other, what would be within the bounds of immersion for you?

Water, obviously (though often it was not necessarily safe to drink). Beer existed, yes, as did wine. Potentially even some fruit juices. Milk. Fermented yogurt drinks.

But tea and coffee? If they were drinking 'boiled water with plant but not the tea plant,' what word would work but not feel awkward? Just use tea? 'Infusion' is weird. 'Brew' for me evokes beer, and sometimes coffee? Should I make up a word, introduce it casually early in the book, and then just treat it as normal from there on?

Like:

Farron accepted the cup, pausing to savor floral scents carried on the steam. It was stronger than the mila she could afford, made with dried leaves sailors brought from Otharil. She wondered if that field she had seen in front of her host's estate meant he actually grew his own mila plants here. If so, it was another reason to stay in the man's good graces.

What are your thoughts?

I'd echo @Dannyalcatraz and say not get too hung up on the terminology; the main point is to communicate a steeped nonalcoholic beverage to the reader.

That said, the Sumerians and their successors drank beer. Thick, porridgy, flavored-with-herbs beer. Tons of it. With straws to filter out the chunks, shared from a large communal bowl.