Stone Creek Coffee has a page on a variety I was unfamiliar with, and there’s a linguistic angle:
If you’ve been following our Reserve coffee line-up over the past few years, and just the coffee world in general, you may have noticed a few observations. This year, we had Wildflower Geisha Colombia and Apricot Glaze Geshe Peru; several years ago, we had Cinnamon Blackberry Gesha. These variations aren’t misspellings; they’re different names for the same coffee variety, shaped by history, geography, language, and each producer’s preference. […]
Why Are There Different Spellings?
The variety traces back to Ethiopia, referring to Mount Gesha, which is why many coffee historians consider Gesha the most historically accurate spelling. Somewhere along the way, Gesha also became Geisha, a spelling that stuck in Panama and throughout much of Latin America. And in Peru, you may also, more rarely, see Geshe, particularly among some indigenous growers and producer communities.
But coffee names don’t travel through history in a clean, straight line. Seeds moved between countries. Agricultural records were translated. Names were handwritten, copied, and adapted between languages over decades. There’s also a fascinating etymological layer here. When words move between languages, Amharic to Spanish, Spanish to English, and through Indigenous languages like Quechua along the way, they rarely arrive as perfect one-to-one translations. Sounds shift. Spellings adapt to fit new alphabets and pronunciation habits. A single original word can branch into multiple versions, each shaped by the language that adopted it.
Gesha, Geisha, and Geshe all reflect different moments in that journey. […] At Stone Creek Coffee, we use the spelling the producer uses. If a farm calls the variety Geisha, that’s what goes on our label. If another producer uses Gesha or Geshe, we use that instead.
I’d say that’s a pretty sophisticated analysis for a coffee site. (The Amharic word appears to be ጌሻ.) Thanks, Sven!
Russian wikipedia says “Гейша (Geisha) или Геша.” Meanwhile English wikipedia frets “Despite the origin of the Geisha name being a misspelling or phonetic rendering for Gesha, the increasing awareness of the variety has raised concerns about improperly linking the coffee with Japanese geisha entertainers.”
Meanwhile, the most common local L1 in the part of Ethiopia including the toponym-of-origin is this rather caffeinated-sounding one: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_caffina
I don’t know whether this is a useful approach to categorization or not, but I find myself wondering whether gesha v. geisha etc. is more like:
A. whiskey v. whisky; or
B. syrah v. shiraz.
Maybe it’s not a bright-line distinction, but there do seem to me to be reasons for trying to distinguish between variant spellings of what is best understood as the same lexeme, on the one hand, and the existence of two different lexemes for the same referent even if they evolved from the same etymon, on the other.
Excellent question, and excellent comparisons! Now I’m wondering too.
“Shiraz” is a folk etymology, though. WAry:
The WP article on Syrah has a long, interesting, but a bit incoherent discussion of the name.
@Y but it seems quite plausible that the modern use of “shiraz” as a synonym for the “syrah” grape may have been motivated by that folk etymology, meaning syrah->shiraz could be an accurate etymology even if shiraz->syrah is an inaccurate etymology.