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."
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.
I did once read a Christian complaining about it because it had the word "Hell" in it. A minority opinion of course.
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.
The first one starts with an "h" that has a loop at the top, the second doesn't. If you do an image search [1], you'll see the two versions. Both have been used in advertising over the years, both in print and in TV commercials.
Susan Kare sells a signed "hello" print on her website and I bought one - it uses the second version [2]. When Apple started their advertising campaign a few years ago using the original curlicue "hello" again, I looked at the print on my wall, and noticed the difference.
I emailed Susan about it and she responded that she hadn't even noticed! She couldn't remember anything about why there were the two versions. My Occam's razor guess is that Apple had recreated the original "hello" at some point and the designer decided to skip the loop. When Susan was making the prints years ago, she looked for a nice high resolution copy of it, and Apple hadn't made the curlicue version of it "official" yet, so the second was the nicest copy out there.
(If you look carefully, there's also a "hello" print ad from the 80s that looks like someone at an ad agency just took a go at it.)
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
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".
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.
To this day there's a ferry and company called Hal över ("take me across" in the local dialect, "Hol rüber" in standard German) https://www.hal-oever.de/de/home/ in Bremen, Northern Germany