The Roots of Hello

Goodbye! But don’t leave just yet because I mean that in the literal sense. I’ll explain in a bit.

I usually visit Wiktionary when I become curious about the roots of a word, and if you are here because of a search result (the Google gods splurt up random blogs to me all the time too), maybe like me, you spend too much time going down internet rabbit holes in general when it comes to looking for the root of something. A few days ago, I got interested in the word hello and tried to get down to the first use of the word, which led me to goodbye and greetings in general, first in English and then in a few other languages. The deep dive was worth it, so stick around if you want my notes.

Some greetings like good morning are universal and self-explanatory, but the supposedly ubiquitous ones have surprisingly complex origin stories. Goodbye is essentially detached from its original meaning!

Welcome to my blog by the way, that’s enough for an introduction and from this point, I won’t speculate too much (but that comes with the territory since most language evolution is not clearly documented and you are just trying to get to the most likely explanation). Here are a few of my discoveries, categorized by language, with sources at the bottom:

I started with English:

Hello (IPA: / hɛˈloʊ /, / həˈloʊ /, / ˈhɛloʊ /) as a common greeting comes up for the first time in print in the Norwich Courier of Norwich, Connecticut in 1826. It was a standard interjection to get someone’s attention. That is before Edison started using it as the standard telephone greeting in the 1880s, but that movement really popularized this alternate salutation. You can read a nice NPR article if you want to read about that short history (and a bonus explanation of where Ahoy comes from), but with all due respect to NPR, I think they ended their investigation prematurely. Hello at the time was just a popularized variation of Hallo, which has a much longer history in the English language with the same meaning that goes all the way back to times when English was more Germanic and is arguably the same word as the German variant, nowadays pronounced differently. More about that later when we get to the German greetings, because the word comes from before the two languages split.

Hi (IPA: / haɪ /) in its current spelling is attributed to a Kansas Indian in 1862, so at least it’s clear the word stems from the United States, but it is just a variation of hey, which we all used before and since then.

Hey (IPA: / heɪ /) is so old and universal, it is basically present in all languages I checked either as hey or ey and is assumed to be a natural human expression. What does it mean? Incredibly it is just an interjection to get attention, perhaps older than language itself. It may be related to hello and hallo as the interjection in the possible predecessor compound greeting of hey lo, where hey means hey and lo means there. Anecdotally, this would would make Obi-Wan’s memetic phrase ‘hello there’ mean ‘hi there there.’ Unlike biological evolution striving for efficient functionality in a competitive field, language evolution just goes the way of least resistance, even if broken. If enough people say it one way, that is how it is said.

On another anecdote, there is a village in England called Torpenhow Hill. Torpen means hill, how means hill and hill means hill. New rulers may have named it Hill Hill Hill rather than learn the meaning of the local word and translate. Check out the Wikipedia article on it!

A GIF of the 'hello there' meme, where Obi-Wan pops up and says the phrase.

Goodbye (IPA: / ɡʊdˈbaɪ /) is a word perhaps not as old and universal as hey, but it definitely does not mean what people think they are saying. It is not a compound word and bye by itself means absolutely nothing. The short form became a standard farewell when people dropped the good, but the good was also not always good as we know it. The original farewell phrase is documented as ”God be (with) you” which over time was shortened to goodbye, which anecdotally presents to us another etymological and philosophical helix of a rabbit hole of how the words for good and God in the Germanic languages are so similar. God is good may be more of an equation in English than a saying.

Anyhoo, every time you say goodbye, you wish someone to go with the grace of God. As a farewell, we say it when we we part ways, but in a literal sense it is a salutation (salutation derives from Latin itself and means to wish someone health).

Then I went back to the first language I learned to speak, Polish:

Cześć (IPA: / ˈt͡ʂɛɕt͡ɕ /) will not come off as a very formal greeting to a Pole, and it is used as an informal hi or bye, but for the origins of the greeting, you just have to go down to the second dictionary entry for the word, which is reverence/honor/respect. For an informal salutation, it packs a revering punch, as Poles unknowingly give each other a great deal of respect when entering and exiting a friendly conversation.

I live in Germany, so I also checked out German:

Hallo (IPA: / ˈhalo /, / haˈloː /) is a word we already covered on the English side since the era it split from German.

Servus (IPA: /ˈse̞ɐ̯vus /, /ˈse̞ɐ̯βus /) is a greeting used in Southern Germany and Austria. It stems from the same word as serve in English and probably is just a remnant from the commoner’s greeting to a feudal lord in medieval times: servus humillimus, Domine spectabilis – I am your most humble servant, my noble lord. Speculating a little, I can see how commoners may have learned the latin phrase phonetically without knowing the full meaning and over time, the first word just because one of the standard greetings. Obviously when passing each other by on a mountain trail, you are not trying to declare your servitude to the occasional passerby, but that is the lost meaning, even though you just wanted to say ‘sup.

Tschüss (IPA: / t͡ʃʏs /) is an informal farewell in German and comes from Northern Germany. It is probably a regional version on the Dutch adjuus, which derives from the Spanish adios. In the end, it means ‘with God’ yet again.

For fun I looked up Hawai’an:

Aloha (IPA: / aˈlo.ha /) is a common hello and goodbye in Hawai’i and curiously also means so many other beautiful things like love, compassion, affection, mercy, sympathy, pity, kindness, sentiment, grace, and charity. A truly beautiful word that came to be a greeting.

And finally out of curiosity I checked Italian and Spanish:

Adios (IPA: / aˈdjos /) is an easy one to define since ‘a dios’ still means ‘with God’ so the Spanish goodbye has become quite international (even morphing into the German Tschüss), but maybe you did not know the meaning.

Ciao (IPA: / t͡ʃaʊ /) is a fun one to end because the Italian salutation comes from Venetian culture and is an evolution of s-ciao or s-ciavo which is a short translation of a medieval greeting similar but also a little more unsettling than the one we covered in the German section. In Venetian, it was common to say this as a greeting: s-ciao vostro – (I am) your slave. Today we are left with ciao.

That last one is now an international greeting detached even from its own language, people just say it in place of bye in over 30 languages. In the case of hello, the most proper usage is probably in the form of a sassy question when someone bumps into you at the grocery store, since it calls for attention with hi and points out the problematic location with lo: ‘Hello?’

But in general, a salutation is an ad hoc utterance and the ubiquitous meaning is clear for all to keep things simple. The literal meaning had to disappear to keep it short and universal, but just like learning the beauty of aloha, learning the full meaning of goodbye or ciao will perhaps bring a little bit more substance to how you say it. Maybe there’ll be a little bit more grace in your daily commute, maybe a little bit more goodwill in the elevator. Thanks for reading. God be with you! Servus!

Random Thoughts

This post will be updated once in a while with my random thoughts.

I am old enough to remember buying two to three magazines at the airport to pass the time on flights and listening to music channels in the arm rest through tubular headphones.

You’re not a cosmopolitan if you don’t bring anything to the table. Don’t be a parasite, bring something to the potluck.

Little Angry Man in my Head

This is a continuation of the thoughts I had in my previous post on writing.

The little angry man in my head sat slumped over in his armchair. He looked asleep. I had to check if it was something more serious. The cigar had been out for a while. I neglected him for a year now – it’s possible he died of boredom. Or possibly from a lack of exercise. You have to walk your inner voice from time to time and I’ve been neglecting mine.

I called to him. No response. He looked more fragile than usual.

I shook him, but only a little, just enough to wake up the inner voice. No response.

I checked for a pulse. It was there, but barely. There’s still hope, I thought.

To keep him alive I started CPR, or as the other part of my brain calls it, „creating prose regularly“ with this short story being an example. Is it any good? I don’t know, this is a stop-gap measure, necessary to get things going. What he really needs is to be awake in moments of inspiration.

You can’t just take the first step and stop. You have to keep on walking, you have to be ready for the times along your journey when your mind runs wild.

Okay, he seems to be moving now, I think he is reaching for the cigar. Good, good.

Note to self: whatever you do, don’t let the little angry man die of boredom.

Combining .VOB files on MacOS with the cat command

Here’s a little little-known trick I learned recently about the cat command on MacOS.

The cat command joins (or more precisely, concatenates) files. Even though there is little documentation out there exactly how many file types the cat command supports, luckily for anyone working with DVD rips, VOB files are on that hard-to-find list.

The command joins the files end-to-end and like .txt, the .vob extension is concatenatable.

Here’s how you do it:

First open Terminal and cd into the directory with the VOB files.

Then run this command, replacing the placeholder file names I used here with the ones that interest you. The order of the files is the order they will be joined together:

cat VTS_1.vob VTS_2.vob VTS_3.vob > VTS_all.vob

If there are many files, but they are numbered, you’re in luck, just run this instead where the * replaces the numbers:

cat VTS_*.vob > VTS_all.vob

The process takes a few seconds. Of course, if you are already using Handbrake, you can just combine and encode VOB files into format of your choice, but this takes much longer.

Frozen Dreams Don’t Crumble

A poem by Adam Pitas

Grassy horizons green, your summer pastures seem free,

Why do I see the trees shedding leaves ahead of me?

Dead leaves pass me by, drawn by fate infected highways,

Suddenly so cold, I wish I could see the byways.

Yet I have to keep the speed up, so I don’t arrive too late,

For a previous appointment that I sealed as my fate.

Can the sunshine see me, do rays even feel the flakes,

Or are they all just smothered by clouds of past mistakes?

Coldness takes pain away and freezes all the shed tears over,

Fixation, desperation, cold determination take over.

I’ll freeze the leaves to pieces, clear broken shards, maybe stumble,

Let all my creepers die in ice, for frozen dreams don’t crumble.

Droplets

A poem by Adam Pitas

Splashes catch my screen,
in the airwaves they did gleam,
full of thoughts and wonders,
between some lies and blunders.

Splashes touch my fingers,
droplets wake the ringer,
whispers from afar,
judging who you are.

Wonders, blunders,
my screen and fingers,
that which drips,
in the web it lingers.

Meadow

A poem by Adam Pitas

A meadow wakes from a dark damp slumber.
Fresh blades flood with fury and rapt wonder,
Watching the march of a merciless light,
Burn and beat out the last breaths of the night.

A fevered meadow awaits the hot swords.
The glistening blades rise to the sun’s hordes,
As a wild wind rips the protective leaf,
Instilled by good night upon the bare heath.

The cool ward of night’s coat is done and gone.
The meadow is scorched with a bright new dawn,
While rays of morn carry dew to the Gods,
Taking sweet life from the fevered rose buds.

Red drops of dew flow from rosy flowers.
Rays of raw light pound with piercing power,
Murdering a meadow stark, yet by strife,
Giving the land a thing vital to life.

Drizzle rises to another hereafter.
Flames drivel with maddening laughter,
Cackling and watching Hell’s floods from the sky,
Scorch the Earth, leaving a meadow to die.

After a callous charge, a sad moon creeps.
Night sees slain flowers and silently weeps.
As a cool, gentle rain breaks pouring down,
Night dons my dear meadow in a damp gown.

Spirits of vapor return to the field.
The grass blades rejoice, my meadow is healed.
New life is sprouting from the soft damp ground,
Tired, my meadow sleeps, renewed and renowned.

On Writing

“Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.”
Ben Jonson, Timber p.59

I figured I should start writing. It’s not easy. Generally, when people say they write, they mean they write a lot. Till now I have a few short stories under my belt, a few pieces that could make up longer stories and a vagabond army of reddit comments. I guess this was all practice. Now I will start actually writing.

But will I actually start writing? It’s a lot of work and there are a lot of lessons to take in. I already know that I have to be careful in what words I choose and where I put them. I also heard that it is important to write clearly.

Writing should also help me think more clearly. And when I think about writing, probably writing about what I am thinking will help me think. I noticed that when I think about something, I get into a loop of thoughts. Perhaps writing can help turn those loops into bullet points for use when I talk.

And if watching interviews of my favorite authors collectively taught me anything, it’s that experts express their views after they write them down. Without that, they are just talking heads, not actually speaking their mind. Perhaps we shouldn’t listen to anyone on TV that hasn’t written about it first. It’s audible if someone wrote about a topic because they speak more clearly.

I always try to write as if I am talking just for that reason. I am trying to communicate my thoughts clearly. It also helps me to have an inner voice narrate as I go. The inner me pauses with every period, with every comma, as well as with every backspace tap-tap-tap when my train of thought derails. He ponders my last move, takes a sip of whiskey, or perhaps puffs a cigar, and narrates along, in a voice more eloquent than my own.

In my mind he is in an armchair, facing away from me, in front of a fireplace of course (I allow my mind for a little bit of personal cliché). When I stop, he stops narrating, leans to one side, and impatiently states, “Well, what are you waiting for? It won’t write itself.”

So, I write. It’s not easy so far because my track record has been sporadic, at best. I don’t want to disappoint this time though. I’ll try to avoid clichés, or maybe limit myself to a couple per post (because I find them funny). And I know, I know, this is a lousy start to my writing marathon because it’s only 346 words long. But hey, as they say, it’s an important first step. And each journey begins with a single step.

First Post

Just testing out features.

Adam Pitas

M.Sc. Architecture

Author: Adam Pitas

The Roots of Hello

Random Thoughts

Little Angry Man in my Head

Combining .VOB files on MacOS with the cat command

Frozen Dreams Don’t Crumble

Droplets

Meadow

On Writing

First Post