> Greek, meanwhile, uses "Γειά σου" (pronounced "yah-soo") as a typical informal greeting, offering a wish for health rather than a simple salutation.
Ironically, the root of "salutation" in latin is "salutare," to wish good health.
> According to linguists, elongated variations such as "heyyy" could be construed as flirtatious, "hellaw" might suggest you're from the southern US, "howdy" from western US, and the clipped "hi" may indicate a curt disposition.
Surely "howdy" derives from "how do you do?" and not "hello."
> Ironically, the root of "salutation" in latin is "salutare," to wish good health.
This is an incomplete description. There is a Latin verb salvere, meaning "to be in good health".
The Latin word "hello" is salve, the direct imperative form of salvere. It is a command, not strictly a wish, to be well. It's essentially the exact equivalent of the English expression "farewell". (Except that it means "hello" rather than "goodbye".) And like "farewell", it is understood in the derived meaning, "hello", not in the literal meaning.
You could understand salvtare as meaning "to health someone" (it is technically derived from salvs "health", and not from salvere "to be healthy"), but you could also understand it as meaning "to say 'salve(te)'". It's relevant here that valere also means "to be healthy", and its imperative form vale means "goodbye", but salvtare is never going to refer to saying vale.
Lewis and Short doesn't distinguish the senses "wish health" and "greet"; salvtare does have a more direct health-related sense, but it is "to keep something safe" rather than "to wish something safety".
That entry also notes that the sense "keep safe" of salvtare derives from sense I.A. of salvs, '"being safe and sound, health, welfare, safety" in general', while the sense "wish health, greet, salute" derives from sense I.B., '"a wish for one's welfare, a greeting, salutation" in particular'.
(Tangentially, I was charmed by the second citation for salvs I.B.: Non ego svm salvtis dignvs? "Am I not worthy of a hello?")
One advantage of using hello as a greeting is that it is agnostic of social rank. This made it the perfect choice for greeting people of unknown social rank on the phone.
Having traveled the world quite a bit I can attest to the ubiquity of the word hello… almost everywhere I go it is understood. ‘OK’ has a similar ubiquity, and it is interesting that both words are relatively new additions to the English (universal?) language.
These are called translingual words. 2 interesting ones are coffee and chocolate. basically no matter where you are in the world, people will understand those (with slight regional differences like "cafe", similar to hello)
I wonder how many non-English speaking countries adopted hello as the default phone greeting. In Russian "allo" is used, which is pretty clearly traced to Edison's hello.
On the other hand, my US-born teenage kids don't seem to be continuing this grand tradition, presumably due to most peer communication happening over text. When called, they just pick up the phone and wait for the caller to speak first. If I stay silent as well, I get an annoyed "yes?" eventually. My lessons in phone etiquette have gone unheeded.
You know why this is, right? Most phone calls these days are spam or otherwise annoyances. Many are literally just seeing if a person picks up. They’re listening to see if you’re a real human being.
This would be true if caller id didn’t exist. I suspect that these kids know perfectly well that it is someone they know on the other end of the line since it is incredibly rare these days for a person to call someone they know from an unknown line.
I agree with the general point, and I myself don't pick up any unknown numbers. But - the kids definitely know when a parent calls, so don't think the spam thing applies here.
IPA makes these conversations less ambiguous. The point is that parts of the South are more likely to use an "ah" sound rather than an "oh" sound in certain places. The BBC's example (supposing it's in good faith) is lacking because it drops the second half of the dipthong following that morphed vowel.
Attempting to write out something close to what I'm imagining they're trying to get across in plain English:
hell-ah-ooh
It's obviously not universal across the South, but you'll rarely see it outside of the South, so "might suggest you're from..." is probably accurate.
It feels as if "hello" is fading out again. It was never completely universal. Where I grew up, people still say "aye aye" (not on a ship btw), along with the usual "good whatever".
I did once read a Christian complaining about it because it had the word "Hell" in it. A minority opinion of course.
BCS have a word for mermaid/siren though (sirena) so it's Mala Sirena. Which makes sense with the sea right there and proximity to Greece so Homeric legends about sirens will presumably be in the culture.
The first time I was in Scotland (from the US), the folks I was there to visit though it would be amusing to send me down to the pub below their flat to order dinner for us all. Off I went. But after accusing each other of not speaking English, I realized there was no way I was going to be able to communicate with the guy behind the bar. My friends laughed uproariously when I tucked tail and came back unsuccessful.
I used to work with a woman from Scotland, and relatively soon we pretty much came to the understanding that I would only understand 1/3 of what she said, but it was okay because she just spoke 3 times as much...
Funny thing is, I remember it being as bad in the other direction - first few times I went to Texas with work, almost everyone seemed to struggle to understand me, seemingly no matter how "properly" I tried to speak!
I used to live at the other end of Aberdeenshire, right out in the countryside. I never get up there now. Not even Aberdeen although I plan to visit some time. Haven't been in years.
The article should have mentioned the Japanese phone greeting of Moshi Moshi. Which I think means I’m going to speak now. Which I think has a wonderful respect for stillness or quiet.
Does it (/ did it originally) actually carry such respect from a Japanese perspective? To me, it seems like a pragmatic solution to cope with bad telephone lines more than anything.
From what I've read moshi moshi was originally pronounced "moushi moushi" and comes from the humble form of the verb to say/speak - moushiageru.
I also found it interesting that the original telephone greeting seems to have been either "oi oi" or "kora kora", which is rough sounding "male speech". This was apparently due to the fact that the first telephone users and operators were exclusively men, but as female telephone operators started to become commonplace the greeting changed to the more respectful sounding "moushi moushi".
The repetition does indeed seem to because of the poor quality of the first telephone lines.
Back in the 80's, I'd call my best friend and when his Dad would answer, he would say, "yello".
Is this a North Eastern thing? His family was from Pennsylvania.
In japanese there is ヤッホ (Yahho~) which might be related to english "Yoo-hoo". Apparently this comes from dutch "joehoe". I've also seen etymology sources list "yoo-hoo" coming from sailing jargon "yo-ho", but these might all be related.
In the article this is not too far from "Γειά σου" (yah-soo) and the supposed root as a ferryman hail (halâ). So I guess the "yoohoo" branch of greetings might in fact be related, or otherwise it's an independent rederivation with two common and similar sounds ("yo"/"ho").
"Yello" might probably be a cute combination of yoohoo and hello. Or you could go all the way with Yahallo~.
Kind of like you might say 'your humble servant' in English, the Venetians would say "sciavo vostro". Literally "your slave" - schiavo vostro in modern Italian. Which then morphed into "ciao".
> According to linguists, elongated variations [of hello] such as "heyyy" ...
Not to be confused with the vocative interjection "Hey" which is likely thousands of years old, at least back to Proto Indo European, but probably earlier.
Ironically, the root of "salutation" in latin is "salutare," to wish good health.
> According to linguists, elongated variations such as "heyyy" could be construed as flirtatious, "hellaw" might suggest you're from the southern US, "howdy" from western US, and the clipped "hi" may indicate a curt disposition.
Surely "howdy" derives from "how do you do?" and not "hello."
This is an incomplete description. There is a Latin verb salvere, meaning "to be in good health".
The Latin word "hello" is salve, the direct imperative form of salvere. It is a command, not strictly a wish, to be well. It's essentially the exact equivalent of the English expression "farewell". (Except that it means "hello" rather than "goodbye".) And like "farewell", it is understood in the derived meaning, "hello", not in the literal meaning.
You could understand salvtare as meaning "to health someone" (it is technically derived from salvs "health", and not from salvere "to be healthy"), but you could also understand it as meaning "to say 'salve(te)'". It's relevant here that valere also means "to be healthy", and its imperative form vale means "goodbye", but salvtare is never going to refer to saying vale.
Lewis and Short doesn't distinguish the senses "wish health" and "greet"; salvtare does have a more direct health-related sense, but it is "to keep something safe" rather than "to wish something safety".
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
That entry also notes that the sense "keep safe" of salvtare derives from sense I.A. of salvs, '"being safe and sound, health, welfare, safety" in general', while the sense "wish health, greet, salute" derives from sense I.B., '"a wish for one's welfare, a greeting, salutation" in particular'.
(Tangentially, I was charmed by the second citation for salvs I.B.: Non ego svm salvtis dignvs? "Am I not worthy of a hello?")
Having traveled the world quite a bit I can attest to the ubiquity of the word hello… almost everywhere I go it is understood. ‘OK’ has a similar ubiquity, and it is interesting that both words are relatively new additions to the English (universal?) language.
On the other hand, my US-born teenage kids don't seem to be continuing this grand tradition, presumably due to most peer communication happening over text. When called, they just pick up the phone and wait for the caller to speak first. If I stay silent as well, I get an annoyed "yes?" eventually. My lessons in phone etiquette have gone unheeded.
You know why this is, right? Most phone calls these days are spam or otherwise annoyances. Many are literally just seeing if a person picks up. They’re listening to see if you’re a real human being.
The phone system is FUBAR.
I am from the Southern US and I am definitely not familiar with this phonetic form. Could be what a BBC writer _imagines_ a Southerner sounds like
Attempting to write out something close to what I'm imagining they're trying to get across in plain English:
hell-ah-ooh
It's obviously not universal across the South, but you'll rarely see it outside of the South, so "might suggest you're from..." is probably accurate.
I did once read a Christian complaining about it because it had the word "Hell" in it. A minority opinion of course.
So, not just Scotland but North East Scotland? (I'm in the shire myself, previously Aberdeen)
I also found it interesting that the original telephone greeting seems to have been either "oi oi" or "kora kora", which is rough sounding "male speech". This was apparently due to the fact that the first telephone users and operators were exclusively men, but as female telephone operators started to become commonplace the greeting changed to the more respectful sounding "moushi moushi".
The repetition does indeed seem to because of the poor quality of the first telephone lines.
Moshimoshi is fully a contextual greeting. (You'd use the good morning, good day, good evening equivalents in person.)
In the article this is not too far from "Γειά σου" (yah-soo) and the supposed root as a ferryman hail (halâ). So I guess the "yoohoo" branch of greetings might in fact be related, or otherwise it's an independent rederivation with two common and similar sounds ("yo"/"ho").
"Yello" might probably be a cute combination of yoohoo and hello. Or you could go all the way with Yahallo~.
(fingers crossed I'm not somehow doxxing myself by sharing a fb link)
Kind of like you might say 'your humble servant' in English, the Venetians would say "sciavo vostro". Literally "your slave" - schiavo vostro in modern Italian. Which then morphed into "ciao".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Williams_(DJ)
Not to be confused with the vocative interjection "Hey" which is likely thousands of years old, at least back to Proto Indo European, but probably earlier.