Are you calling me on the cellular phone? Who is this?
A few days ago I followed a link to Omniglot, a treasure-trove of comparative linguistics for laymen and the lovers of global alphabets, of which I am both. The page I landed on was titled Translations of Hello in many languages and featured a giant three-column table offering standard greetings in 182 languages. (…) a three-column chart? For along with “Language” and “Hello” there was the distinct-yet-apparently-essential column labelled “Hello (on phone).”
Scrutinizing column three got me thinking about how technology, language and culture intersect and interact. It’s fascinating that the telephone would require its own category of greeting—at least for 27 of the 182 languages listed. Moreover, for the vast majority of those, the word for “Hello (on phone)” is a cognate of the English hello—good news for any of us planning to answer the phone in Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Kurdish, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu or Vietnamese. (…)
The history of hello is long and mired in many vowels. Though it didn’t show up in its current form till the mid-19th century, its forbears are many and obvious: hallo, halloo, hillo, holla (a Shakespearean favourite recently returned to slang prominence), hollo, holloa—all generally being a combination get-attention-and-greet, useful for hailing passing boats and that sort of thing.
photo { Helen Levitt }
