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.)
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".
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)
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.