Latin

The long-awaited resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales leaves President Bush with the responsibility of appointing someone to take his place. His nominee is 66-year-old federal district judge Michael B. Mukasey. Mukasey seems to be a shoo-in, with the enthusiastic support of conservative members of Congress for his generally rightist rulings, but also the grudging respect of the liberals for his thoughtful and reasonable analyses.

Perhaps he also deserves the support of linguists. He once presided over a civil trial, in which Coors Brewing Co. sued Anheuser-Busch over alleged unfair advertising. He sided with the defendant, but he declined to adjudicate their dispute over the question of whether pasteurization affects the taste of beer.

In his decision, he summarized his opinion on that issue in Latin:

De gustibus cerevesiae non scit lex.

Meaning: Concerning the taste of beer, the law knows nothing.

Linguistic note: When I was in Spain, I overheard a group of Germans making fun of the Spanish for using the (to them) strange word cerveza for "beer." They noted that in the other European languages they knew, the word is an obvious cognate of the German word bier, including French and Italian, which are Romance languages like Spanish. Obviously they thought that the Germans had invented beer and the neighboring peoples had adopted the word with the brew, leaving the Spaniards as oddballs.

What they didn't realize is that beer is the oldest known alcoholic beverage and like many technologies was discovered independently in more than one place and time. Chemical evidence of beer has been found in both Mesopotamia and Egypt, dated about 3500BCE, long before the Italic and Germanic tribes ever set foot in Europe, bringing the deconstructed components of Mesopotamian civilization with them and setting about to rebuild it. It may go back 2,000 years before that. Cerveza (as well as Catalan cervesa and Portuguese cerveja) is derived from the perfectly respectable Latin word cerevesia.

Cultural speculation: As we know, as the Roman Empire declined it was overrun by Germanic tribes, customarily called "barbarians" because they were Neolithic peoples from the fringes of civilization. Many Germanic words were absorbed into the "Vulgar Latin" of the time, some of which evoke images of the troubled times such as werra for "war," replacing Latin bella. Bier may have been brought in at the same time and conjures visions of drunken Langobards, Vandals and Visigoths raping and pillaging.

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Iberia was a little too remote to be heavily ravaged by the conflict. The Iberian people conserved the Roman word for beer, although they did adopt the Germanic word for war, e.g. Spanish guerra.

Speaking of Germans and beer, perhaps you've noticed that the American brewing industry seems to be dominated by the families of German immigrants who arrived in the mid-19th Century. Anhäuser, Busch, Coors (Kurz), Pabst, Schlitz, Yuengling (Jüngling,) etc.