MGalloway (WMF)

Currently collecting words like "hello," "hi," etc.

Some offbeat ways to say hello from Amir

So, some of my idiosyncratic ways to say hello and similar things:

Hallo. It's uncommon in today's English, but when I studied English in the Soviet Union, this spelling was taught in the textbooks. When I started seeing "hello" in real English books, I found it quite odd, but got used to it eventually, but I still often use "hallo" to recall funny little things from my childhood. In German and in some other European languages that's the usual spelling for this word.

Preved. It's an important part of the Russian Internet culture. It's not as common today as it was in middle of the previous decade, but is still widely recognized by the Runet aficionados.

Shalom (שלום). In Hebrew it literally means "peace". It can be used both as "hello" and as "goodbye". It is widely used and understood, but in common speech, as well as in informal writing, it is probably more popular to use the English words "hi" and "bye" (with adaptations to Hebrew sounds and spelling). I usually stick to "shalom", both because of my affinity to mild linguistic purism and because of the positive meaning of the word. When I once wrote it in a chat to my eleven-year old niece, she found it amusing and said: "only you say shalom, everybody else says hi". While it's an exaggeration, it's true that "shalom" lost its popularity somewhat.

Finally, when people ask me things like "how's it going", I usually reply "Life is good" (Hebrew: החיים טובים, ha-khayim tovim). I do it in Hebrew and in English. It's not a very common expression in any language. As I said, it's idiosyncratic.

Hope it helps! --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 21:27, 3 October 2013 (UTC)