Recognition of the arrival and departure of another person takes many verbal forms, and salutations spring from surprising sources. Hello, as we’ll discover, began with a human imitating the howl of a hunting dog. This time we look at expressions of greeting and farewell in English and in some foreign languages. On the TV series and in the movie versions of Star Trek, the Vulcan Spock says, “Live long and prosper.” Ancient Romans had the somewhat abrupt ave atque vale, “hello and goodbye,” which always reminds me of the ditty that comedian Groucho Marx used to sing, “Hello, I must be going.” The Latin is literally “hail and be well” and might be the source of Spock’s bye-bye. Bye-bye is a contracted and then duplicated form of “goodbye,” itself a centuries-in-the-making compression of “God be with you.” Ave Atque Vale The Romans used ave and avete by themselves for saying hello or goodbye. Later ave was a morning greeting, and vale was used when leaving someone in the evening. In classical Latin, ave atque vale came to be a formulaic farewell to the dead, as in the touching final line of the obituary poem that the lyric Roman poet Catullus addressed to his departed brother: Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale, “now for all eternity, my brother, farewell.” When the slaves and criminals who made up the ranks of Roman gladiators were about to enter the arena to almost certain eventual death — ancient Rome had few Retired Gladiator Clubs — they marched past the V.I.P. box and saluted the emperor with this formula: Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant, “Hail, Emperor, those Like ave were the classical Greek chaire and chairete, which were used both on meeting and on leaving a person. Their root meaning was “Rejoice! Be happy!” Hello Hello appears to have arisen in its first instance as an imitation by hunters of a hunting dog’s yowl. It is marked “echoic” in many dictionaries, which then add its early forms like halloo from medieval French Ciao The very informal and familiar Italian ciao can be used as a greeting or a farewell. Ciao sounds approximately like our food word chow. Ciao came into standard Italian from a Venetian dialect where ciao is a condensed variant of schiavo, “slave” in the longer formal greeting schiavo suo, “your slave,” itself a reduction of sono il suo schiavo, signore, “I am your servant, sir.” How very close to the Victorian English greeting we read in Charles Dickens, “Your servant, Mr. Scrooge.” Today one may still hear such a greeting in Latin in the common Austrian greeting Servus! with stress on the last syllable. Servus harks back to the days of ancient Rome when slavery was in force, and slave servants had to greet their masters with the lickspittle sibilance of servus sum, “I am your slave.” Slave The word slave and its Italian form schiavo merit mention here. They are both from a medieval Latin word Sclavus and its slightly later form Slavus, both of which referred first to any person who belonged to the large group of peoples of central and eastern Europe who spoke Slavonic languages. Medieval Latin borrowed the word from the Slavs’ own name for themselves. In Old Slavonic, Slovëne was the word for a Slavic person. It means literally “speaker” from Old Slavonic slovo, “word.” They were the people of the word; that is, they spoke a Slavonic language. The rest of the world spoke gibberish. Almost every linguistic group on earth has words insulting those who do not speak their tongue. The Russian word meaning “a German person” does this: nyemets whose literal meaning in Old Slavonic is “does not speak.” But it means “does not speak Russian.” The When did Slav come to mean “slave”? In the tenth century, during the eastward expansion of the Franks under Otto I (AD 913–973), many speakers of Old Slavonic were in fact conquered and enslaved. The change in meaning from Slav to slave occurred a little later in Italy , after the raids made by Venetians upon Slavonia during the time of the Crusades. By the time that the word schiavo had been altered and reduced to ciao, it meant simply “servant.” So, to requote from Groucho Marx, “Hello, I must be going.”
© 2006 William Gordon Casselman
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who are about to die, wish you health.” Darn nice of them too — when one considers they were being sacrificed only to ensure the emperor’s popular-ity as a provider of spectacle for the Roman mob, or, in the famous phrase of the satiric poet Juvenal, as a provider of panem et circenses, “bread and chariot races.” That is often loosely translated as “bread and circuses.” But this circus is the circular race around the spina, as in the thundering, clattering contest in the film Ben Hur. 
halloer, “to pursue game with shouts and cries.” Compare, too, the Old High German verb halôn, “to hail a ferryman by shouting halloo across the water.” Halloo, hullo, hello are a few of many variants that include the reduplicated hullabaloo. 
word for baby talk, nonsense, and goo-goo in very ancient Greek was bar-bar. The Greeks thought if you were not speaking Greek, you were just uttering gibberish words like bar-bar. Such non-Greek speakers were the original barbaroi, “barbarians.” Even the philosopher Plato divided mankind into Greeks and Barbarians. Plato was also a big fan of slavery. 
