lai2le as in kafei laile. What does the le character mean and what is its pinyin?
When handing something over, such as when someone orders a coffee and their coffee is brought to them, my book uses the expression kafei lai le. It doesn't translate the parts of lai le or give the pinyin tones.
When I looked up the character lai in my dictionary I found it listed as "comes; arrives" so that "Kafei laile" would seem to literally mean "Here comes the coffee". I would understand that if it only said "Kafei lai" but what does the le mean? I couldn't find it in my dictionary or nciku.com but it looks exactly like the last character in taihaole ( a word I only saw in my book translated as great or super but I couldn't find in the dictionary).
So in short, what is the pinyin for laile and what does le itself mean in the phrase and by itself?

Question

lai2le as in kafei laile. What does the le character mean and what is its pinyin?
When handing something over, such as when someone orders a coffee and their coffee is brought to them,  my book uses the expression kafei lai le. It doesn't translate the parts of lai le or give the pinyin tones.
When I looked up the character lai in my dictionary I found it listed as "comes; arrives" so that "Kafei laile" would seem to literally mean "Here comes the coffee". I would understand that if it only said "Kafei lai" but what does the le mean? I couldn't find it in my dictionary or nciku.com but it looks exactly like the last character in taihaole ( a word I only saw in my book translated as great or super but I couldn't find in the dictionary).
So in short, what is the pinyin for laile and what does le itself mean in the phrase and by itself?

Answer

"le" just indicate "past tense" without any substantive meaning
le usually follows a verb to express the action(of the verb) has (been) done. 

ka1 fei1 lai 2 le (untoned) simply equal "here you go"

Answer

Hello  Meir，

咖啡来了
Yes it means " here comes the coffee"
It is lai2 ( second tone) le ( 5th or no tone)

了here is used as a modal particle intensifying the preceding clause or it is used as completed action maker. 
It is difficult to translate that word in English ,because it doesn't have any equivalent . Many Chinese would tell you  " it has no meaning ".
Yet in Chinese you will have noticed that those particles are used many times as question tags or auxiliary particles and do add a certain emphasis to the sentence that couldn't be literally translated in English.

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