beer: beer bar/brewery
It appears in Atraidis’s song “New Widow” (1934)
day and night among the beers
I stay up late, poor me
Ah, now that makes sense. Indeed, it is a common word in quite a few songs, including some very well-known ones, and this is a meaning of the word that has been completely forgotten nowadays.
This will indeed fill a gap.
Why did μπύρα become μπίρα?
Initially, because there was no reason for it to be spelt with an upsilon. Beer, bierre, birra, Bier — neither y nor u.
Later, because simplified spelling became standard for all loanwords: all [i] sounds were written with ι, all [e] sounds with ε, and so on. So even if υ had some etymological basis, as αι did in the once-upon-a-time spelling traíno (“train”), it would still be written with ι.
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For the sake of simplification, yes, I know. But what was the “υ” based on? Perhaps the “ee”s?
I don’t know. No, with the ee’s, one would expect *μπήρα. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious rationale—probably none at all, anyway.
It must have caught on by chance…
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That is exactly what I would have thought too. The era when upsilon was pronounced like the French u had long since passed…
Perhaps they were misled by zythos?
Anyway, whatever the case, it’s spelt with an iota, and it should have been spelt with an iota even before the simplification.
Seriously, how did we come to have this word?
AI Overview:
The word zythos (a learned term for beer) comes from the Hellenistic Koine zŷthos, which in turn probably has Egyptian origins. It refers to an alcoholic beverage made from barley malt and hops, constituting an ancient name for the drink now known as beer.
So, a learned word formation… (We need to find a word to name this beer—beer, bier, birra, whatever it’s called—that came to us with the Bavarians, who also brought along this Fuchs fellow to set up a factory…)
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