NPPF Bera Range

[Mary Krimmel]

You're not the only one left.

Thank you for all your enlightening information, such as this below about 
the Bera mountains in Wales, and the whole story of Charles II of England. 
You have added much to my enjoyment of PF.

Let no one be misled by the "(Dutch beer)" in Jasper Fidget's note below. 
My copy of OED punctuates this a bit differently,  "..., MDu. bere, Du. 
beer...", with "bere" and '"beer" both italicized, which shows more or less 
clearly that they are the "same word". Both mean "bear", the animal, as do 
the other words in the OED etymology. The American Heritage dictionary 
gives the Indo-European root as "Bher-. Bright, brown."

Though perhaps beer can be bright or even brown, the word "beer" comes from 
an entirely different root.

I wonder whether the Welsh mountains are bears as in Old English or are 
bright brown. My dictionary gives no Welsh derivatives from "bher".

Mary Krimmel


At 10:17 AM 9/18/03 -0400, you [Jasper Fidget] wrote:
>What's going on with the PF read?  Am I the only one left?  Already?
>
>p. 137
>"The Bera Range"
>
>Kinbote describes "a two-hundred-mile-long chain of rugged mountains," a
>Zemblan mirror of the Appalachian Mountains.
>
>The word "bear" comes from the Old English "bera": "[Old English bera =
>Middle Dutch bere (Dutch beer), Old High German bero (German Bär), from West
>Germanic: rel. to Old Norse bjœrn.]" (OED)
>
>Bera Mawr ("Big Bera", 2605 ft.) and Bera Bach ("Little Bera", 2648 ft.) are
>two mountains in the Carneddau range of northern Wales, part of Snowdonia,
>and near Afon Goch river and Aber Falls (two names that resonate slightly
>elsewhere in PF).  Big Bera happens to be shorter than Little Bera; they
>were probably named this way because Big Bera is more impressive to look at.
>
>http://www.crux.u-net.com/tables/Wales/Carneddau.html
>http://www.wherekillarney.com/bera.html
>http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/simon.edwardes/index.htm
>http://www.britainexpress.com/wales/tour/
>
>Try as I might I could not coax Charles II of England into crossing the
>Carneddau mountains; instead he stopped short of the Severn and returned
>east.  Neither could I rearrange geography so that crossing them would lead
>into the Wye Valley -- they are in the Northwest part of Wales, while the
>Wye is in the Southeast.  (I wonder if VN encountered similar frustrations
>in researching his book?)
>
>So why the "Bera" mountains instead of, for example, the Black Mountains,
>which do border the Wye?
>
>There's a Bera (Beara) Peninsula in Ireland, one of several peninsulas in
>the southwest that extend into the Atlantic like fingers pointing across the
>ocean, and which is divided down the spine by the Caha Mountains and cut off
>basally from the mainland by the Kenmare River.  (And no, neither "Bera" nor
>"Beara" turns up in Joyce as far as I can discover.)
>
>http://www.carn.com/Bearaindex.htm
>
>I thought maybe Bera was intended to suggest Lavrenti Beria (1899-1953),
>Stalin's boss of the Soviet NKVD (Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs,
>a domestic secret police before the KGB), believed responsible for the
>deaths of millions of Russians in the purges, and later imprisoned and
>executed by Krushchev.
>
>http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSberia.htm
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD
>http://www.fas.org/irp/world/russia/kgb/index.html
>
>"Bera" is also a language used in the Congo.
>
>http://www.language-museum.com/b/bera.htm
>
>(This site is great by the way -- it provides examples from 2000 different
>languages.)
>
>Tasik Bera is the largest natural freshwater lake in Peninsula Malaysia.
>
>http://www.marimari.com/content/malaysia/popular_places/lakes/bera/bera.html
>
>None of which is very compelling.
>
>The geographical features described in this passage do seem to allude to the
>real Novaya Zemlya, with its chain of rugged mountains (an extension of the
>Urals) and its impassable canal (the Matochkin Strait that divides the two
>islands).  To the west is the Barents Sea, so another formulation of Bera I
>suppose....
>
>Jasper Fidget