I began wondering recently whether humankind's discovery of the medicinal uses of alcohol might have been a precursor to what's loosely called, "civilization." There are no really ancient words for hooch that I know of, yet the antiseptic quality of alcohol would have surely lowered mortality rates from drinking water downstream of a wooly mammoth's poop. The word, "alcohol" is of Arabic origin, thus not that old, but archaeological evidence suggests pre-civilization use of fermented food and drink. Can anyone lend some paleo-verbal credence to my hunch?

Beer

I don't think we are aware of a PIE word for alcohol, but of course that doesn't mean they didn't have any.

Do you know what today is?

It's a very interesting question, Geoff, which we talked about on our chat today. Goofy, wouldn't the PIE words all be known? Or do you think there are a lot out there that we don't know about?

I am wondering if there is a word for it that isn't related to the "hooch" part of alcohol, but to the cleaning part.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Goofy, wouldn't the PIE words all be known?

Not necessarily. We don't know the word for "arm", but I'm pretty sure they had arms.

Sure they had arms. How else would they have picked up their beer?

I found this so far in my search: http://faculty.unlv.edu/landau/alcohol.htm

Odd that a scholarly paper would have typos, but it does. Not sure what that says about the research.

Geoff, it looks like it came from something like a pdf, which doesn't translate well when you copy and paste it. That might be the reason for the typos? Anything scholarly should be peer reviewed and shouldn't have typos, at least for the most part. Having said that, I published an article once in a peer reviewed journal, but they made a mistake when publishing it and repeated an entire sentence. I was incensed!

Goofy, I found this in etymology.com about "arm":

quote:

"weapon," c.1300, armes (plural) "weapons of a warrior," from Old French armes (plural), "arms, war, warfare," mid-13c., from Latin arma "weapons" (including armor), literally "tools, implements (of war)," from PIE root *ar- "fit, join" (see arm (n.1)). The notion seems to be "that which is fitted together." Meaning "heraldic insignia" (in coat of arms, etc.) is early 14c.; originally they were borne on shields of fully armed knights or barons.

Would that ar root, meaning to "fit, join" be related to a person's arm?

Geoff's document has been scanned into MS Word and then converted to HTML. The OCR program used probably introduced some errors, and Word is notorious for its HTML output.

I am a bit confused, but then I probably usually am. If you're talking about alcohol and the history of civilization then it sounds to my tone-deaf ear like an archaeological question. If we're talking about what the word is for "beer" or "distilled drink" or some such in a particular language, then we are limiting ourselves to recorded languages which puts us around 6K year BP at most. OK 10K-15K BP for reconstructed languages (maybe). But as goofy points out the reconstructed PIE lacks a lot of roots associated with common things which does not necessarily mean that the PIEers did not have a word for those items or not talk about them in a round-about way.

OK, thanks, Z and Goofy. It does seem that we've got nothing but speculation WRT the switch from hunter-gatherer to farmer, with no verbal history as a "smoking gun." It's speculation to think that "aqua vitae" clearly suggested a medicinal use of alcohol, and, being Latin, isn't very old anyhow.

z, the original question was about alcohol and the history of civilization, you are correct. However, as many threads do, the thread deviated in a number of ways, from the etymology of alcohol (and "arm") to typos in scholarly papers.

the original question was about alcohol and the history of civilization

But, then, Geoff asked for some kind of historical linguistic evidence to back up his hunch. It's in the opening post.

quote:

But, then, Geoff asked for some kind of historical linguistic evidence to back up his hunch. It's in the opening post.

If Geoff had given it any thought, he would have seen the absurdity of trying to find linguistic evidence that far back. Sometimes Geoff is just plain stoopid!

It has been hypothesized that a switch from raw to cooked food, which supplied much greater nutrient density, preceded the development of human brains, since brains are high energy consumers (except mine, it seems). Cooking meat killed parasites and bacteria, thus making meat eating relatively safe as well. Result: population explosion #1. It's an extension of this hypothesis to think that safe water via fermentation of fruit might be the second great development leading to explosion #2, and to civilization. But that's archaeology and anthropology, not linguistics.

z, we had originally talked about this on the chat, and it started as a history of civilization question. We then began to wonder about the words.

I don't remember being at that chat, so I only have the opening post to go with.

Yes, you were not on that chat - I should have read the first post more carefully. BTW, we've been missing you on the chats.