Re: Beer, here!!!

--- In cybalist@..., "danjmi" <dmilt1896@...> wrote:

> Looking up "beer' in Buck, I find the Greek "brutos/ bruton" with
> the comment "first used (Archil.) with reference to Thracian or
> Phrygian beer and properly a Thracian form : OE breowan 'brew"
> etc. Walde-P. 2.168"
> So we're dealing with Thracian, not Greek, phonology.
>
> Beer was always a bit foreign to the Greeks. The currently
> dominant brand has the strange name of "Fix". Apparently in
> 1832 when the European powers sent a spare Wittelsbach
> prince to be King of Greece, he brought along his
> Hofbraumeister, a Herr Fuchs. After thirty or so years the Greeks
> threw out King Otto, and replaced him with a Dane. All that's left
> from the Wittelsbach dynasty is Bavarian blue in the Greek flag
> and Fix beer.

That Dane was a son of the father-in-law of Europe, as he was known,
Christian IX, of the Glücksburg dynasty, chosen in a last-ditch
attempt to save the Denmark-Schleswig-Holstein state (but he did
learn Danish). He also delivered a queen to Britain (Alexandra) and a
tsarine for Russia. The whole family met every summer at the castle
Fredensborg to bad-mouth cousin Wilhelm. He on his side declared that
he felt like a "Sohn des Hauses" (after Germany took Schleswig and
Holstein). Tableau.

For some reason that b-r- has something to do with beer. The
descendants of bjórr may have died out in Scandinavia, but Danish
slang for "a beer" is bajer (< bajersk[Bavarian] øl), Swedish is bärs
or birra.

Torsten