can’t it be that it’s from the czech language, because ahoi means hello in the czech republic.
I’d also think that it would be odd for a nautical term to have originated in a landlocked country, but stranger things have happened.
It’s customary to give a link to the column on which you’re commenting.
Here ya go.
BTW I’m delghted to see that Cecil is a lover of Peregrine Pickle. It’s one of my favourite books too.
Sorry, Švejk, didn’t notice you’d already linked.
As often comes up in Shakespeare circles, Bohemia (or at least the territory ruled by the King of Bohemia) did, briefly, have a coastline.
As to Peregrine Pickle, it’s mostly cool, but that embedded “true confessions” of an upper-class slut that he embedded is mighty difficult to slog through. All those pages and pages and pages of “It wasn’t my fault”, “I lost my true love”, “It wasn’t my fault”, “My husband was a perfect beast”, “It wasn’t my fault”, “Love made me do it”, “It wasn’t my fault”, “I could have behaved much worse, but I didn’t”, “It wasn’t my fault” may have been fascinating to the salaciously minded of the age, but it’s just bloody boring now.
Ha, I remember that chunk. Memoirs of a Lady of Quality or some such thing. I completely skipped it, it has no connection with the rest of the novel, Smollett inserted it just to boost sales, I think, shrewd Scot that he was. Coincidentally I just finished Travels Through France and Italy a few months ago and enjoyed it as much as his novels. (In fact the testy Smollett, constantly inveighing against cheating landlords and knavish ostlers, could be a character straight out of one of his novels!)
How do the Czechs pronounce ahoi?
Bohemia never had a coast line, its borders have been pretty much set since the days of the Holy Roman Empire; maybe the King of Bohemia ruled some territory that did have a coastline but not in the capacity of being the king of Bohemia. Just because the guy running Bohemia was also running some other place does not change where Bohemia is, which is hundreds of kilometers away from the closest sea.
The stress is on the first syllable (as is always the case in Czech). I don’t know how to describe the a-sound to an Anglophone audience, but its like /a/ in German or French. -hoj (it’s spelled with a j) is pronounced /hoi/.
It 'twasn’t Cecil as wrote that, it was I. Or, in other terms, it was me. Thus, I’m moving this thread from CoCC to CoSR. I dunno if Cecil has readPeregrine Pickle, but 'twas I wot quoted it. I have no clue about Czech influence, but Ave! is Latin so it’s not surprising that there are lots of related words meaning “hello there” in various European languages.
To be specific, Ottakar II ruled over Styria, which reaches to the Adriatic.
Still, to say that Bohemia had a coastline because Otakar II ruled over Styria is to say that England is in the Pacific because it ruled over Australia.
FWIW
It only occurs to me now to ask whether “ahoj” does, in fact, mean “hello”. Present-day English is the only natural language I know of that actually has such a word.
Why would the Czech word in a country with no maritime history become a sea greeting for English speakers? Even the Austrian Empire (which Bohemia was part of) didn’t have much of a navy.
It’s more likely the other way: An English sea greeting infecting the Czech vocabulary rather than the Czech word for “Hello” becoming the standard sea greeting in English. England did have a large navy, heavily patrolled the Mediterranean, and it is very possible that someone from Bohemia picked up the word from a trip aboard an English vessel.
You can find it in Swedish as well as a loan from English, although a bit archaic nowadays.
I’d read awhile back that Alexander Graham Bell had actually suggested “ahoy-hoy” (not “ahoy”) as the standard phone greeting, which is why Mr. Burns uses it on The Simpsons.
Yes. There were existing English words “Hallo”, “Hillo”, “Hollo”, and “Hullo”, with a range of meanings from “Hey!” to “Over (t)here!”, “Wow!”, or “What the ___?”, but “Hello” was invented by Thomas Edison (!) specifically to answer the telephone with instead of “Ahoy!”. (“Hello girls” was once slang for “telephone operators”.) It then spread into daily non-telephone use.
“Hello” is also exceptional in that many languages use a different word just for the telephone. Italian, for example, uses “Pronto!” (“Ready!”), which, when used as a greeting on the street instead of on the telephone, means something like “Hello, sailor!”, which I suppose brings us back around to “Ahoy!”
Present-day English speakers think of “Hello” as a perfectly ordinary word, but, in fact, it is very rare to have a word that serves as a neutral greeting or salutation without actually meaning something.
Wikipedia says there were publications with “hello” as early as 1833, well before Edison was born. It does give Edison credit for suggesting “hello” as the standard telephone greeting.
Wasn’t that inspired by the poor and weak sound of early systems (well, specifically of the earpieces)? Don’t imagine a slender Victorian lady picking up the phone and warbling “Ahoy-hoy” in a gentle voice. You had to yell into early phones, more like “Ahoy!! Hoy!!”. You see this behavior sometimes in P.G. Wodehouse stories of the 1930s, mostly by older, obnoxious characters who clearly haven’t updated their telephone technique. The Duke of Dunstable was always prone to shout “Hoy!!” into telephones, usually after the other person had hung up.
Edison might have suggested changing over to “hello”, but it doesn’t seem to me one of his better accomplishments. Certainly it’s not one of his ninety-nine percent perspiration efforts. Variants of “hello” had long been used usually in the context of communication under difficult circumstances. If you wanted to check if somebody was stuck at the bottom of a well, you might say Hello down there!. Or Hello up there, or Hello, over there if the other person was above you, or across a river from you, and so on.
I’m not convinced that the differences among “hello”, “hallo”, or “hillo” are significant in any case. The accent in all those calling-over-distances situations is on the second syllable.
Since they do not indicate how it is used, it could as easily be only a variant spelling of “H[aiou]llo” as anything else…
The OED gives each of “Hallo”, “Hillo”, “Hollo”, and “Hullo” a separate entry.