The number of TV channels? The number of electric appliances in my house? The ease of getting food and ready-to-eat meals and, well, anything really, delivered to my house? No, as significant as these are, I think the biggest difference between my life and my grandmother’s is the number of times in a day I bump into unsolicited and seemingly random chunks of new information. I’m left wondering whether my grandmother was *ever* accosted by answers to questions she hadn’t asked, or even thought to ask. To wit:
A friendly greeting goes a long way, and in Gaelic, there are different ways to say hello depending on the time of day:
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- Hello – Halò! (ha-LOH)
- Good morning – Madainn mhath! (MAH-tin vah)
- Good afternoon / Good evening – Feasgar math! (FES-kar mah)
- Good night – Oidhche mhath! (OY-kuh vah)
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I had not, in fact, been wondering about Gaelic greetings, but–courtesy of something or other on the internet–here we are now. Let’s see what we have, shall we?
The lead-in seems unnecessary: surely we all know that a friendly greeting goes a long way, and all languages that I’ve been exposed to have greetings related to the time of day. Of course as soon as I wrote that I Just Knew and, indeed, it turns out that this is not a universal truth. In this good-grief-this-must-be-comprehensive catalogue, I particularly enjoy these less-time-constrained options:
- Greetings that vary with the time of day plus the weather, with distinct greetings for a cloudy morning or a rainy afternoon, for example
- Greetings used only at the end of the workday
- Greetings that ask how you slept or whether you’re, you know, even awake
- Greetings that welcome you here
- Greetings that express interest in how things are going in various aspects of your life (land, crops, work/business, children, health)
- Greetings that ask where you came from or where you’re going
- Greetings that ask whether you’ve eaten recently
- Greetings that, taken literally, ask whether it’s really you, or whether you’re really here
- Greetings used only on a second meeting on the same day
- Greetings that reflect social status, like greetings reserved for children, or greetings used only by children when addressing their elders
- Greetings that are wishes for good things (peace, health, long life, victory) to fall upon you
But I’ll admit that the nature of greetings was my second thought. My first was to be wary of the handy pronunciation guide, especially MAH-tin vah, based on my own experience with a similar pronunciation challenge in English itself. But maybe my fears were unfounded. As this cheery guide went on to say:
If someone greets you first,
you can simply reply with the same phrase.
Why didn’t I think of that? If I can hear it accurately and reproduce it faithfully under the time pressure usual in a social interaction, then, yes, indeed, I can “simply reply with the same phrase”.
Or I could just smile and nod. That goes a long way, too.
You could always say, “No problem.” This was a popular reply a few years ago, even to the greeting, Merry Christmas.
Barbara – 🙂 No problem! Yeah, doing that in reply to Merry Christmas is kinda weird – sort of a content-free “I acknowledge that you said something” response. I catch myself saying “You too” (as after “have a nice day”) in places where it doesn’t work quite so well (as at the airport when a clerk wishes me a good trip). Sigh.
A smile is good at any time!
Tom
Tom – And usually safe!
Is anyone else laughing to the point of tears over this? Something so casual and mundane requiring so little thought — or so I thought — turns existential and desperately complex. Much like a Monty Python skit. The Greeter tries each variant to a string of people arriving at a breakfast venue. I want two characters playing the foil (or fool), one of whom nods and smiles whatever the greeting, while the other of whom has a language gap and says, “You, too.” Or, “YouTube.”
Laurna – 🙂 I’m still thinking about filming my Mah-tin/Mah-tin interaction, but I don’t suppose anyone would believe it could happen like that. Given how hard things can sometimes be in my native language, I have immense respect for anyone who can “simply” repeat a foreign phrase heard just now for the first time.
Isabel – rightly or wrongly, children used to be taught by their parents how to greet other people. Are you telling me that parenting has now been taken over by the internet? I’m not surprised, but still.
And BTW, in your list of greetings for every occasion the popular American greeting, “What church do you belong to?” is missing. Just saying.
John – I expect kids still learn greetings from their parents, whether by teaching or by observation or both. I’ve never been asked about my church affiliation as an initial greeting or as a subject of conversation in the USA, but my truly social interactions there are limited. Mostly I meet Americans in business settings of some sort. I’ve never been asked about my church affiliation as an initial greeting in Canada, but a couple once sat at my table in a crowded department-store cafeteria and, finding out that I’d just moved to Saskatoon, invited me to make their (evangelical) church my church home, so there’s that.
Actually you are correct. “What church do you belong to?” usually comes just after, “What do you do for a living?”
🙂