how to say numbers in different languages

#How to say numbers in different languages how to

We’ve collected phone greetings in all 14 Babbel languages, and thanks to James Chapman, dedicated illustrator of onomatopoeia, we’ve also included the word for a telephone’s ringing sound in all these languages. Internationally, the word “hello” is so closely associated with answering the phone that many languages use a derivative of it. And how did the first phonebooks recommend people end their telephone conversations? With a simple, “That is all.” Once the first phonebooks standardized the usage in their “how-to” sections, “hello” caught on as a standard greeting, on and off the phone. In 1877, Thomas Edison suggested the word that finally stuck, but at the time “hello” (or “hullo”) didn’t yet mean “hi.” It was more of an exclamation used to attract attention, like, “Hello! Over here!” That was a bit too nautical for most early adopters, and it never caught on.

When the telephone was still a new invention, a debate raged about what people should say when they picked up this newfangled gadget.Īlexander Graham Bell, who patented his design for the telephone in 1876, expected people to say “Ahoy!” when they picked up the phone. That’s right, “hello” was a phone greeting before it was commonly used in person. If you think that early telephone users simply decided to answer the phone the same way they greeted each other in person, you’ve actually got it backwards.

#How to say numbers in different languages how to

Most of us say “Hello?” when we pick up the phone without a second thought, but why that word and not another, and why do so many languages use some version of “hello” as a telephone greeting? The Earth wasn’t created with telephone technology already in place, and we weren’t born knowing how to answer the phone.