Comment by detourdog
13 hours ago
The article should have mentioned the Japanese phone greeting of Moshi Moshi. Which I think means I’m going to speak now. Which I think has a wonderful respect for stillness or quiet.
13 hours ago
The article should have mentioned the Japanese phone greeting of Moshi Moshi. Which I think means I’m going to speak now. Which I think has a wonderful respect for stillness or quiet.
Does it (/ did it originally) actually carry such respect from a Japanese perspective? To me, it seems like a pragmatic solution to cope with bad telephone lines more than anything.
From what I've read moshi moshi was originally pronounced "moushi moushi" and comes from the humble form of the verb to say/speak - moushiageru.
I also found it interesting that the original telephone greeting seems to have been either "oi oi" or "kora kora", which is rough sounding "male speech". This was apparently due to the fact that the first telephone users and operators were exclusively men, but as female telephone operators started to become commonplace the greeting changed to the more respectful sounding "moushi moushi".
The repetition does indeed seem to because of the poor quality of the first telephone lines.
> The repetition does indeed seem to because of the poor quality of the first telephone lines.
I'm pretty sure it's also commonly pronounced "moshi mosh~" as a side-effect of this repetition.
Could be, this was just my impression.
Interesting. In Australia, people often use erhm or aah/aahm as an interjection to announce that they are about to commence speaking.
Japan has that too: あの (ano) and えっと (etto) are used as fillers to indicate that you're about to say something.
Moshimoshi is fully a contextual greeting. (You'd use the good morning, good day, good evening equivalents in person.)