Whisky Galore (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Hatty]

Seamus Heaney, born and raised in the "Irish nationalist tradition" as he puts it, wrote that the word 'whiskey' is the same in Irish and Scots Gaelic and comes from uisce, meaning 'water' and therefore the river Usk (in the Brecon Beacons) means the river Uisce or Whiskey. He actually writes that it's a river in Britain though it rises in mid-Wales and ends up at Newport, via Caerleon.

[DPCrisp]

I dunno whether the SC = SH rule can be applied in Irish. If it can, then I suppose we're looking at wash and wish, as in wishing well and the Celtic(?) obsession with water as interface to Another World.

{'Course, the books say these are Germanic words.}

[Hatty]

The mention of uisce made me think of the Basque language, Euskara (?); the word for 'water' in Basque is ur apparently (although there are seven or eight Basque dialects!).
Irish and Scottish Gaelic differ, in spite of Heaney's statement - water is uisge in Scots version.

[Mick Harper]

Yes, but can we be sure that water wasn't just a novelty trade item introduced by one group to the other, and therefore the term is merely a loanword?

[DPCrisp]

...uisce...uisge...

That's why I'm not sure the SC = SH rule applies.

...made me think of the Basque language, Euskara

Yes, we've talked about "Euskadi = water people?".

can we be sure that water wasn't just a novelty trade item...

There's also something about Basque and Celtic(?) having two words for water: maybe one refers to the commodity.

[Ishmael]

DPCrisp wrote:

[Hatty]

In Gaelic 'usquebaugh' or 'ulsge-beatha' means 'water of life'. Is there a history of whisky-making anywhere except in Scotland and Ireland? I wonder if whisky is related to Biscay. Where does Basque/vasco/basco come from?

Peat is a natural antiseptic.

[DPCrisp]

Also Gascon. I think I just had the vague idea that Basque and Eusk- were the same. I don't think any old consonant can appear at the front just like that, but it's supposed to have been around a looong time: plenty of time to diversify? And we do have G = U, U = V and V = B rules to play with.

---

Celtland is the home of alcohol?

But notice, when it comes to "everyone drank beer because the boiling made the water safe and that's why everyone is mad on alcohol, especially in the West where we seem best genetically adapted to it": cider correlates to the Celts and the juice is not boiled in the process; whiskey involves a lot of boiling, but could never be a dietary staple.

What's whiskey before it's distilled? Did anyone ever drink that?

[Mick Harper]

Vodka or zhizennia voda also means 'water of life'. Now it passeth all belief that two different cultures would stumble on the same poetic metaphor to describe their national distilled alcoholic drink so it follows that one borrowed it from the other.

But now we come to the real mystery: who ever heard of one culture borrowing a poetic metaphor from another? Yes, borrow the drink; yes, borrow the method; yes, borrow the word (remember vauxhalli railway stations?) but it passeth all belief that one would borrow a poetic metaphor.

Therefore 'water of life' is not a metaphor. Originally it was something to do with what?...saving life?...suggestions welcome.

And then there is the question of, as Lenin put it, who whom? Who gave it to who? Only one tiny indicator here and that is it is vodka that looks like water, not whisk(e)y.

[Hatty]

Vodka, in its various names, is claimed by the Poles to have originated in Poland and by the Russians from Belarus and Ukraine, the Lithuanians say it was brought by Genoese merchants ("aqua vitae" was the generic term for alcohol).

Maybe we're looking at a Scythian link here. Vodka is also the national drink of Sweden and Finland. Its progress from the Black Sea to the Baltic mirrors the migration of steppe nomads pushed westwards and northwards - eventually to Scotland?

[Mick Harper]

If it's the Genoese that are first circulating distilled spirits then it looks as though it is a monastery thing (as tradition implies) but this is presumably originally from Arabs who, though not big on alcohol, are big on chemistry at this point. The link might be via the Templars or it may be via Spain. However if it is Arab in origin this would reinforce the idea that 'water of life' (aqua vita too of course) is medicinal.

The trouble with this theory in AE terms is that we don't know of any life-preserving properties that alcohol or distilled liquids in general have....do we?

[Hatty]

Looked up whisky and it says

[Mick Harper]

As you know. we're always looking for high-value, low volume goods which would explain how our various 'historical' movers-and-shakers got going. Alcohol itself would certainly count as something that might open long-distance doors except that
1. the concept of alcohol is so old (how old?) that it would seem to predate the groups we're primarily interested in.
2. most alcoholic beverages (beer, cider, wine) are actually very high-volume, never mind how high-value they might be.

But, consider the following:
1. Making alcohol, though relatively simple, is still sufficiently technical for it to be a craft-skill possessed by travelling specialists.
2. Alcoholic "mash" in various forms might be sufficiently high-value, low-volume to be the basis for travelling starter-kits.
3. Whiskey is an example of the tendency to offer high-value, low volume forms of alcohol that run over the top of the workaday cider, beer, wine etc.

[Mick Harper]

One of our enduring unsolved mysteries is why the 'Celts' were so obsessed with peripatetic water sources. Is there something about such water (or perhaps in such water) that would be of interest to specialist alcohol-makers?

[DPCrisp]