Subject: Beer
<guto rhys <gutorhys@...> (Sat Sep 7, 2002 3:44 pm) wrote:
<<Good, beer - one of my favourite subjects. 'Cwrw' is beer (<'cwrwf' <
'cwrf' < Celt. 'korma').>>
Interesting. ANOTHER attested Greek word for beer is <korma>!!!! Fancy that.
In L&S equated and compared with the Greek <kourmi>, mentioned by Dioscorides
in the 1st C. AD, and defined as kind of beer made from barley. It looks
like a reference to "the unwinnowed gatherings for a rough mash... used in
making crude beers" (Budweiser History of Beer) --- compare <kouros>,
cuttings, from <kiero:> to cut.
There's no question that the Greeks made serious cultural contact with the
inhabitants of what is later called Celtic Gaul at least as early as the 8th
century BC. And I think there's little challenge to the idea that some very
basic Greek words made their way into the later lexicon of that neighborhood
(like the "cord" word.) This might suggest that the many different beer
words in early Greek (bruton, zutos, oinos krithinos, pinon, korma) reflect
not merely a sloppiness in terminology, but a recognition of differences in
technique and product. And the spread of such words might reflect an
international community of commercial beer makers, rather than direct descent
of ancetral words form *PIE.
BTW, one of the Greek words for beer, <pinon>, attested in the BCE, is also
interesting. <pino:>, drink, is a big boozing word going back to Homer. But
there's also a word group in Greek that refers to fat, cream, "the thick
juice of trees", the "choicest part of a thing." Sounds like a word you
could also apply to a boiled-down grain malt or maybe its fermented extract.
One of those words is <piar>. Remember, Greek <p-> is often German <b->.
Finally there's the ubiqutous "brewski" word here in the US. (There must at
least one tavern bearing that name in every NFL city.) If the tendency to add
foreign language endings ("Steverino" is another one) or use the foreign
words themselves ("hamburger", "hooligan", "the whole enchilada") to create
pet words happened in the past in IE languages, then how these words actually
traveled may be very difficult to retrace.
Steve Long