To be fair, the origins of "hello" go back much further than 600 years. Variations of it appear in Old Icelandic from almost 1000 years ago, and if you look at Old English texts from hundreds of years before that you will find greetings such as "Wes þū hāl!" (or roughly, "May you be well!"). In other words, all are based on salutations which have most likely been in use in one form or another for at least two millenia (if not longer).
> Greek, meanwhile, uses "Γειά σου" (pronounced "yah-soo") as a typical informal greeting, offering a wish for health rather than a simple salutation.<p>Ironically, the root of "salutation" in latin is "salutare," to wish good health.<p>> 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.<p>Surely "howdy" derives from "how do you do?" and not "hello."
> Ironically, the root of "salutation" in latin is "salutare," to wish good health.<p>This is an incomplete description. There is a Latin verb <i>salvere</i>, meaning "to be in good health".<p>The Latin word "hello" is <i>salve</i>, the direct imperative form of <i>salvere</i>. 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.<p>You could understand <i>salvtare</i> as meaning "to health someone" (it is technically derived from <i>salvs</i> "health", and not from <i>salvere</i> "to be healthy"), but you could also understand it as meaning "to say <i>'salve(te)'</i>". It's relevant here that <i>valere</i> also means "to be healthy", and its imperative form <i>vale</i> means "goodbye", but <i>salvtare</i> is never going to refer to saying <i>vale</i>.<p>Lewis and Short doesn't distinguish the senses "wish health" and "greet"; <i>salvtare</i> does have a more direct health-related sense, but it is "to keep something safe" rather than "to wish something safety".<p><a href="https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dsaluto" rel="nofollow">https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...</a><p>That entry also notes that the sense "keep safe" of <i>salvtare</i> derives from sense I.A. of <i>salvs</i>, '"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'.<p>(Tangentially, I was charmed by the second citation for <i>salvs</i> I.B.: <i>Non ego svm salvtis dignvs?</i> "Am I not worthy of a hello?")
Russian also uses "Be Healthy!" (in imperative mode, like Latin) as a greeting: "Здравствуйте!" ("Zdravstvuite").
allo
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.<p>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.<p>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.
I believe Allo is inherited from french, that was used already before edison/phone as interjection.
> and wait for the caller to speak first<p>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.<p>The phone system is FUBAR.
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.
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".<p>I did once read a Christian complaining about it because it had the word "Hell" in it. A minority opinion of course.
On the nautical theme, Czechs say "Ahoj" (pronounced "ahoy"). Especially charming because Czechia is landlocked. I have no idea how this came about.
I've only used it while working customer-facing jobs. Outside that, it's 'ey, yo, whatupdoe, wuzzappenin, but usually just the good old nod.
I use ‘alright?’ far more than ‘hello’
Exactly, there's another one. Another common one along with G'day, wassup, how ye doin?, hiya, wotcher, and all kinds of other things?
Scotland?
> According to linguists, elongated variations such as "heyyy" could be construed as flirtatious, "hellaw" might suggest you're from the southern US,<p>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
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.<p>Attempting to write out something close to what I'm imagining they're trying to get across in plain English:<p>hell-ah-ooh<p>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.
Probably. They're not very cultured there.
It’s for when you’re greeting a cute animal.
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.<p>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".<p>The repetition does indeed seem to because of the poor quality of the first telephone lines.
Could be, this was just my impression.
Interesting. In Australia, people often use erhm or aah/aahm as an interjection to announce that they are about to commence speaking.
Japan has that too: あの (ano) and えっと (etto) are used as fillers to indicate that you're about to say something.<p>Moshimoshi is fully a contextual greeting. (You'd use the good morning, good day, good evening equivalents in person.)
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.
The Swiss band Yello was named after this (sort of): <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yello#History" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yello#History</a>
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.<p>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").<p>"Yello" might probably be a cute combination of yoohoo and hello. Or you could go all the way with Yahallo~.
I remember my dad saying "yello" in the 90's, here in Northern California. Pretty sure he just said it because he found it amusing.
I've heard people in Utah say this as well
I'm confused that, speaking of origins, they don't mention at all Spanish "hola", having literally the same meaning as hello?
Ciao is an interesting one.<p>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".
At least in Alsace we sometime use "service" as a "you're welcome" equivalent instead of the more widespread "de rien", or "avec plaisir" you will ear in France.
In Bavaria and Austria they say "servus" which literally means slave/servant in Latin.
What's the origin of "Hello World"?
For programming, the origin is the K&R book <i>The C Programming Language</i>.
Radio DJ William B Williams' on air greeting, apparently.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Williams_(DJ)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Williams_(DJ)</a>
Interesting read. How we got the word “goodbye” is also a cool story.
> According to linguists, elongated variations [of hello] such as "heyyy" ...<p>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.