I just came to say hello
Richard Hale
? 26 years' experience & expertise, helping businesses remove the stress & expense of localisation, by providing accurate specialist translation services on time, every time. Over 2600 clients helped so far! ??????????
Hello is one of the most well-known greetings in the world, although it has only been in use for the last 150 years or so. It is thought to have developed from the word ‘hail’ which used to be a common greeting in the Middle Ages. The Oxford English Dictionary also describes it as a variant of ‘hollo’ from the French holà ho there! Lots of people have heard the story of Thomas Edison suggesting the use of ‘hello’ when answering the phone, although apparently Alexander Graham Bell, who actually invented the telephone, preferred to use ‘ahoy’ (this is also a Czech greeting used as an informal way of saying hello – spelt Ahoj).
Hello is a fairly simple salutation and is usually accompanied by a ‘how are you?’ or a ‘how are you doing?’, but other countries have some rather interesting greetings – take a look at some of the literal meanings of their ways of saying hello:
Botswana: How did you wake?
Bhutan: Is your body well?
Georgia: Let you win.
Iceland: Happy.
Mauritius: Speak!
Swaziland: I see you!
Replace your usual ‘how are you?’ with one of these and you’ll be sure to catch your listener’s attention!
References
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hello
?https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-origin-of-hello