Talk:Beer

Beer-word?

From the section "Etymology":

In Old English and Old Norse, the beer-word did not denote a malted alcoholic drink like ale, but a sweet, potent drink made from honey and the juice of one or more fruits other than grapes, much less ubiquitous than ale, perhaps served in the kind of tiny drinking cups sometimes found in early mediaeval grave goods: a drink more like mead or cider. In German, however, the meaning of the beer-word expanded to cover the meaning of the ale-word already before our earliest surviving written evidence. As German hopped ale became fashionable in England in the late Middle Ages, the English word beer took on the German meaning, and thus in English too, beer came during the early modern period to denote hopped, malt-based alcoholic drinks.

What does "the beer-word" mean? Does it mean the literal word "beer" or whatever word meant "beer" in Old English and Old Norse?

This paragraph should be made clearer. JIP | Talk 18:05, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Is the source Scandinavian? That actually looks to me like the way they would phrase it in Norse or Swedish, but it sounds odd in English. More than half of the most common English words in everyday use are Scandinavian in origin, but the influence of French played a larger role in our modern syntax. (Very little is left of its Germanic roots.) If so, then it would be talking about the word beer and the word ale, which is how it should be phrased.

It should probably also be mentioned (if it's not already) that another theory is that it might have come from the Latin word biber, meaning "a drink" (for example, the English word imbibe, meaning "to drink"), although beer was considered an exotic Egyptian drink on the Europe side of the Mediterranean, English has a tendency to adopt words from other languages and twist and change them to fit its own needs. There's no clar consensus, except that the in etymology the transition of a word from one meaning to another is often far more figurative than literal. Zaereth (talk) 00:28, 19 September 2023 (UTC)