Ancient Greetings...

[Arjos]

Do we know how the ancients salute eachother during the EB time frame?
The only one I know is the latin "Ave" and I'm not even sure if that can be considered colloquial...

[abou]

In Latin, the general greeting in person and in letters was salve or salvete for plural. The Greeks as a greeting would say chaire or chairete for plural.

These were verbs used in the imperative and used in an idiomatic sense. For example, salve is from the verb salvere: to be well or in good health. In a way, you were ordering the addressee to be well in your greeting. You can probably then see etymological derivatives of this word.

[Arjos]

Never knew of "Salve", in Italian is still used ^^
Thank you abou...
Anyone knows any greeting from different languages?

[Lazy O]

Salam. (peace)

[Walle]

Salam. (peace)

Is that old persian? Because I know that it's at least a greeting in modern persian (farsi).

[Ludens]

It's Semitic, actually. The Jewish word for peace is "shalom". Presumably the Persians adopted it after the Arabic conquest.

[tsidneku]

In Latin, the general greeting in person and in letters was salve or salvete for plural. The Greeks as a greeting would say chaire or chairete for plural.

These were verbs used in the imperative and used in an idiomatic sense. For example, salve is from the verb salvere: to be well or in good health. In a way, you were ordering the addressee to be well in your greeting. You can probably then see etymological derivatives of this word.

Yeah, abou's got it in the bag. χαίρε (chaire - sg.)or χαιρέτε (chairete - pl.) for the classical Greek greeting. χαιρεῖν is a verb that can also mean "to rejoice". And salve (sg.) or salvete (pl.) for the Latin.

[Ibrahim]

Is that old persian? Because I know that it's at least a greeting in modern persian (farsi).

It's specifically Arabic: and actualy, it was pretty rarely used before Islam-but used nonetheless. and it's a contration of "as-salamu alayka", which translates literally to "peace on you" (as-salamu alaykum, often nowadays incorrectly used on individuals, actually grammatically should be used on a group of people)

more common greetings back then were to basically "order" the guy to have evil spirits cast off of them, or to be protected by a given deity, or some other invocation.

unfortunately fo you, I don't remember the exact terms in Arabic itself. it may be that "ahlan wa sahlan" is pre-islamic in origin (it translates to "a family and path"; it's a contration of "7ulilta ahlan wa wati'ta sahlan", which translates to "you have come by a family (i.e, will be treated like one) and stepped into an easy path"

[Cadwalader]

These were verbs used in the imperative and used in an idiomatic sense. For example, salve is from the verb salvere: to be well or in good health. In a way, you were ordering the addressee to be well in your greeting. You can probably then see etymological derivatives of this word.

A lot of modern greetings also seem to be concerned with health. To hail, for example, or the Slavic (in this case Czech) zdravit which I think is cognate with zdravý, healthy. I don't know if this usage of the words is from Latin. If it isn't, I guess it could mean that this way of greeting goes back a long time. Some examples from other IE languages would be helpful.