Ahoy
Ahoy is a signal word used to call to a ship or boat. It is derived from the Middle English cry, 'Hoy!'. The word fell out of use at one time, but was revived when sailing became a popular sport. 'Ahoy' can also be used as a greeting, a warning, or a farewell.
One or another variation on the word is found in several languages. In Czech and Slovak, ahoj is a common, colloquial greeting, while 'hoi' in Modern Dutch and Swiss German, ‘oi’ in Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, and 'Ohøj' in Danish are informal greetings equivalent to the English 'hi' or 'hey'.
‘Ahoy’ originated in the seafaring world, where it was used as an interjection to catch the attention of crew members and as a general greeting. It is often used today by participants in playful imitations of pirate speak.
Alexander Graham Bell initially suggested that the standard greeting when answering a telephone should be 'ahoy', but instead 'hello' was adopted.
Early forms and development
"a, hoy, hoay"
Ahoy is a combination of the call 'hoy' plus the sound 'a', presumably added to draw more attention to the cry. 'Hoy!' was a common call in England to drive cattle. The earliest known example is from William Langland, in whose 1393 epic poem, Piers the Ploughman, the word first appears in Middle English: 'And holpen to erie þis half acre with 'hoy! troly! lolly!', which roughly translates to "And helped to plow this half acre with 'hoy! troly! lolly!'".Seamen used the word "hoy" in the form of "hoay". The Scottish poet William Falconer, author of a nautical dictionary, wrote 1769: "If the master intends to give any order to the people in the main-top, he calls, Main-top, hoay! To which they answer, Holloa!", Two other dictionaries from 1805 list Falconers call as "hoay" and answer "holloa". "Ahoy" does not appear.
Functionally related with "hoy" is a group of similar sounding calls and greetings in the Germanic languages: Middle and Modern English "hey" and "hi", German, Dutch, Danish and Norwegian hei, in Sweden hej, and the Dutch greeting hoi.
In Old Russian "goy" was a standard greeting which is still present in Russian folk fairy tales.
In Czech and Slovak, 'Ahoj' is a commonly used as an informal greeting, comparable to "Hello". It was borrowed from English and became popular among people engaged in water sports. It gained wide currency by the 1930s.
ahiu, â hui
Two discoveries in Middle High German literature reveal interjections similar to ahoi. Their forms show no links to the middle English form hoy and their meanings offer little connection to the call used to establish contact.In around 1290 Heinrich von Freiberg used the form ahiu twice in his adaptation of Tristan as a greeting: "ahiu, Parmenois Tristan!", alongside "ahiu, wie schône sie het sich ûz gefêgetieret", English: "ahiu, how prettily she has dressed!". Ahiu has the same meaning as the interjections ahiv, ahiw and hiu, which occur in this text as well. As part of a group of words consisting of ahî, ay and ahei, which express pain, desire and admiration, ahiu can be found before exclamative or optative sentences and in emphatic greetings.
Between 1331 and 1341, in his work Kronike von Pruzinlant, Nikolaus von Jeroschin inserted the expression "â hui! sô wêr ich hôchgemût / sô ich ir stirne sêhe blôz". Ahui, together with aheia, ahi and ahu, belongs to a group of words that express incommensurable joy, esteem and similar positive attitudes.
Distribution and use
General information
had been using ahoy long before the first recorded use in print in well-known seafaring songs or shanties. There is a lack of research into handwritten letters and records from seamen. Therefore, printed works concerning the use of the "Ahoy"-word family have only restricted significance regarding the temporal and geographical distribution."Ahoy" represents the original English form and its first maritime use was recorded in 1751 as a new word in nautical language. The first evidence for the German word "ahoi" is found in 1828. Ahoy is widely used in the Northern and Baltic Maritime World. It expresses semantically a change in distance or presupposes it. In most languages it can be used as an interjection, whilst in others it takes the form of a verb or a noun It is not known how the word spread in harbour towns or on ships with an international crew, especially as similar sounding interjections in a neighbouring language may have either interfered with or promoted the adoption.
In spoken German, either the command or the addressee can come first, e.g. "'Pfeil, ahoi!" or"Ahoi, Pfeil"!" although in written German there is no comma between the two words. In other languages this is variable.
English
First examples
The exclamation "Ho, the ship, a hoy!", pronounced by a seaman in Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Roderick Random, is the first known written example of the expression ahoy in the English language. One early example of the expression can be found in William Falconer's Dictionary of the Marine : "The usual expression is, Hoa, the ship ahoay!". In the first edition of this dictionary the expression was still in its previous form hoay.In the 1780s ahoy was already used on the stage in London to create a sea-faring atmosphere. In this way it reached a very wide audience. In the comedy The Walloons, brought to the stage in 1782 by the playwright Richard Cumberland, the expression was used to catch someone's attention: "Ahoy! you Bumboat, bring yourself this way". The work was published posthumously in 1813.
In another early documented source, as well, ahoy was similarly used to catch someone's attention. The expression ahoy was heard in 1789 in the lyrics of a sea shanty, a worksong sung by able seamen, when the English composer Charles Dibdin performed his musical The Oddities in London. This work also contains the song Ben Backstay, about a boatswain. The song goes: "And none as he so merrily / Could pipe all hands ahoy". The lyrics were not published until 1826.
Consolidation
In the 1799 edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary the word "ahoy" is still missing, but in the 1824 edition it was said "to be almost as important as holla", supported by a quotation from Cumberland in 1813. The first entry in this popular reference book can be seen as an acceptance of "ahoy" into the English language. In the first half of the 19th century the word already began to find its way into many neighbouring languages. A speculation from 1835 about the origin of the French word oyez, which means "hört!" in German, implies an early philological engagement with the word. It had already appeared in a metaphorical context before, when in the American trade town of Philadelphia a preacher started to build a church for sailors in 1819. According to his memoirs, sailors used to greet him with "Ship ahoi" and to ask where he was going. The preacher used to answer back: "To the New Jerusalem harbour". We sail under the admiral Jesus, a good captain. We need men: "As the sailors said right before they were taken on: "Now we come in and listen to your conditions"The variant "ohoy"
The variant ohoy was used early on as a synonym for ahoy. In one anecdote, printed in 1791, it appears as the ironic greeting of a captain to his boatman who is dressed up like a Romney Marsh Sheep when he entered the stage: "Ohoa, the boatswain, the Romney, Ohoy!" The "boatswain answered "Holloa" and disappeared. The Scottish poet Thomas Campbell published a satirical poem in 1821, in which a rider shouted: "Murderer, stop, ohoy, oh". In 1836 the Scottish novelist Allan Cunningham wrote: "Ohoy, Johnnie Martin! Ohoy, Tom Dempster! be busy my "merry lads, and take me on board".The form "ohoy" has been adopted by several Nordic languages.
Their dictionaries give the English ohoy as a single source word, usually before ahoy sometimes afterwards.
German, diffusion
Research
The term remained widely unknown to German readers until 1840s, since the translators of popular maritime literature of the time avoided it. 1843 saw the first German translation of the word å-hoj to "hiaho" from a Swedish novel.The earliest documentation of the term in German language appears not in non-fictional maritime texts but the nautical prose. In the beginning, the circumstances point to uncertainties regarding the usage of the word. Since the late 1820s, the words ahoy and ahoi marked with the coda -i, a feature demonstrating Germanization of ahoy, can be found in the German translation of English novels and fictions. Around the same time, the term was used by authors in original German texts on rare occasions. Ahoi became an established term around 1950 as it was used in the works of widely-read authors from the 1940s onward.
The term rarely appeared in dictionaries in the 19th century. It is not included in the "Urduden" dictionary published in 1880. The Grimm brothers’ Dictionary of German did not recognize the word at the time; it did not appear in the first volume, published in 1852, with entries up to the keyword "allverein". The DWB's second edition published in 1998, documents the earliest uses of the term as occurring in 1846 and 1848. In addition, the original index cards for the dictionary, which are kept in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, do not contain any earlier entries. The standard work "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache" by Friedrich Kluge lists ahoi as a separate entry since the 1999 edition.
The automatic search for appropriate keywords in digitalized books on the internet and in offline-databanks does only lead to a few useful results. German light fiction was printed so badly in the first half of the 19th century that even today good recognition software still produces a great number of errors, so that records are not found. Research in original catalogues is still necessary for a systematic search.