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Ahoy () () is a Interjection 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 language and Slovak language, ahoj is a common, colloquial greeting, while 'hoi' in Modern Dutch language and Swiss German, ‘oi’ in Brazilian Portuguese and Italian language, 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' (suggested by Thomas Edison) was adopted.
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!",William Falconer: An universal dictionary of the Marine. London 1769, s. v. Holloa, cited according to OED s. v. hoy int. Two other dictionaries from 1805 list Falconers call as "hoay" and answer "holloa".J. J. Moore: The Midshipman’s Or British Mariner’s Vocabulary. London 1801 und Washington 1805, s.v. hoay. Charles James: A new and enlarged military dictionary. 2. Aufl. London 1805, s.v. hoay "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, OED s.v. hey, hi and the Dutch greeting hoi. Het Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal op Internet, s.v. hoi, verified on 19 November 2008
In Old Russian "goy" was a standard greeting which is still present in Russian folk fairy tales.
In Czech language and Slovak language, '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.
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.
"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 Semantics 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 (e. g. English - "to ahoy", German - "ahoi sagen") or a noun (e. g. Swedish - "ohoj", German - "das Ahoi") 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.
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 probably first heard in public in 1789 in the lyrics of a sea shanty, a worksong sung by able seamen, when the English composer Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) 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.
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.
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 Syllable 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.Dietmar Bartz: Ahoi! Ein Wort geht um die Welt. In: derselbe: Tampen, Pütz und Wanten. Seemannssprache, Wiesbaden 2014, , S. 306
The term rarely appeared in dictionaries in the 19th century. It is not included in the "Duden" dictionary published in 1880. Grimm Brothers Dictionary of German (Deutsches Wörterbuch) 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.Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm: Deutsches Wörterbuch. 2. Aufl. Leipzig, Stuttgart 1983ff s. v. ahoi 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.Friedrich Kluge: Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. 23. Aufl. Berlin, New York 1999, , s. v.
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.Dietmar Bartz: Ahoi! Ein Wort geht um die Welt. In: derselbe: Tampen, Pütz und Wanten. Seemannssprache, Wiesbaden 2014, , S. 306 f.
In 1830 Cooper used the word ahoy five times in a story whose title was the same as the name of the ship Water Witch (German Wassernixe). A translation by Gottfried Friedenberg was released in the same year and he chose ahoi four times. Friedenberg missed out the first occurrence of the word ahoy. It is possible that in 1830 the German word was relatively new. In later editions this mistake was corrected. Friedrich Knickerbocker, who published the second translation in 1831, overlooked or rewrote ahoy also incorrectly as "Holüber!"
The "Wer da", or "Who's there?", the phrase he introduced once was not new. In 1824 and 1827 the German editions of Cooper's story The Pilot were released, in which ahoi was translated with similar expressions, such as "Wer da!", "Wer da?", "heda" or "He! He!". Not until 1842 in der Lotse (English, the pilot) ahoy became the standard interjection due to Eduard Mauch's translation, however this contained four ahoys and one ahoi.
In 1835 and 1836 the anonymous translator of the two-volume story Trelawney's Abentheuer in Ostindien, which was published by sailor and later author Edward John Trelawny in 1832, who kept ahoy as a loanword.
In 1837 the novel Lykkens Yndling/Das Glückskind was released in Danish by the author Carl Bernhard, who had also translated it into German. Bernhard was the pseudonym of the Danish novelist Andreas Nikolai de Saint-Aubain. This is probably the earliest import from a Scandinavian language and gave us the phrase "Ahoi, en Sejler" meaning "Ahoi, ein Segler!" (English - ahoy, sailor!).Carl Bernhard: Das Glückskind. Kopenhagen 1837, S. 459.
The Austrian writer Charles Sealsfield first used the word ahoy in its original form. Sealsfield, who was also known by his real name Carl Anton Postl, lived temporarily in New Orleans, where he had many contacts with sailors. In his novel Morton oder die große Tour, which was published for the first time in Zürich in 1835, a big crowd of excited people in Piccadilly Circus in London is summoned with the exclamation "Gare! Gare! take care! Hallo ho! A hoy!". The same exclamation is still to be found in the following editions of 1844 and 1846. In the footnotes to a reprint, the word Gare was appropriately corrected to Care, but wrongly used in the text in all three editions. The English form is correctly given, in two words, which was very common at that time.
In Sealsfield's novel Pflanzerleben (Zürich, 1836), the word is used before uttering an order: "Ahoi! Ahoi! (...) Hört ihr nicht? die Pferde dem Herrn Grafen abnehmen.", that is "Ahoi! Ahoi! (...) Don't you hear? Take the Count's horses." An English translation of the book appeared in the United States in 1844, in which the word ahoi is kept in its German form. Also in his last novel, Süden und Norden (1843), Sealsfield again used the English spelling, in two words: "Sail a hoy – an ennemys sail!" The translation in a footnote to that page reads: "Kapitän, ein fremdes (feindliches) Segel."
In one of Ernst Willkomm stories from 1838, Jan, one of the characters in the story shouts "Ship Ahoy" as loud as a thunder from the cliffs of Heligoland. This was misprinted as "ship ahni" by the German newspaper Zeitung für die elegante Welt (English: A Newspaper For the Elegant World) , in which Willkomm's Lootsenerzählungen (English: Pilot Stories) first appeared. The misspelling was corrected when the story was published in a book in 1842. With its meaning apparently unknown to the publisher, the word reappeared in the same German newspaper in a narrative called Johann Pol. An Image of life in the west indies by an anonymous author in 1838. The said narrative depicts sailors from all around the world chanting "Ahoi, oi" while loading the ship.
The 1844 Politik an einer Wirthstafel by Friedrich Giehne uses the words 'Waitress, Ahoy' in an expression addressed towards a waitress by a character. The story was published in a book which included mostly reissues of materials printed between 1836 and 1843. However, there was no mention of when the said story was first published or whether or not it was actually a reprint. What is interesting is that the word "ahoy" was used on and off the ship. One such example of an off sea usage can be found in Smollet's novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in 1751 in which commodore Trunnion utters " Ho, the house, Ahoy!". It is likely however, that Giehne might have borrowed the term from Smollet as he could have read an 1840 translation of Smollet's work by Georg Nikolaus Bärmann from English to German.Dietmar Bartz: Ahoi! Ein Wort geht um die Welt. In: derselbe: Tampen, Pütz und Wanten. Seemannssprache, Wiesbaden 2014, , S. 308 f.
In 1844, The German author Heinrich Smidt used the term "Ahoy" in parts of a pre-print version of his novel titled Michael de Ruiter. Pictures of Holland's Marine which was published in 1846 in the Magazine for the Literature from Abroad of which he was the editor .Berlin 1846, zitiert nach Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm: Deutsches Wörterbuch. 2. Aufl. Leipzig, Stuttgart 1983ff s. v. ahoi, Zitat in der Schreibweise des Wörterbuchs The term was also used in another one of his narratives in 1844 titled Hexen-Bootsmann. There is no trace of "ahoy" in the recently digitized versions of Smidt's works originally published between 1837 and 1842, however, the term has a continuous presence in all of his works since 1844 until his last novel which was published in 1866. Therefore, it is likely that Smidt added the word to his vocabulary sometime in 1843.Dietmar Bartz: Ahoi! Ein Wort geht um die Welt. In: derselbe: Tampen, Pütz und Wanten. Seemannssprache, Wiesbaden 2014, , S. 309
Friedrich Gerstäcker was one of the most successful and popular German authors of adventure novels in the 19th century. As was the case with Smidt who started using Ahoy in 1844, Gerstäcker, who translated a lot from the English, also suddenly used the term in 1847. "Ahoi – ho – ahoi! meine braven Burschen" (English: "Ahoi – ho – ahoi! My well behaved fellows"), is what he writes in the Mississippi pictures. In 1848 the sentence: "Boot ahoi! schrie da plötzlich der gebundene Steuermann" (English: Ship ahoi! shouted the helmsman suddenly"), appeared in Gerstäcker's novel Flusspiraten des Mississippi (English: The Pirates of the Mississippi).
The word created a maritime atmosphere in many songs which were composed after the period of the Tall ships, but without the traditional meaning of ahoi. In 1934 the song Wir lagen vor Madagaskar was composed with the first line of the chorus "Ahoi Kameraden". This can be seen as a sailors' song. The Pop song Schön ist die Liebe im Hafen with the final line of the chorus "Auch nicht mit Fürsten und Grafen / Tauschen wir Jungens, ahoi!" is based on a waltz, which was also composed in 1934. The Edelweiss Pirates probably adopted ahoi from Czech teenagers and used it as a greeting even after the group was banned in 1933. It was also used by Rammstein as a bridge on the 2003 song Reise, Reise from the album with the same name. The song has a nautical theme about fishermen.
Amongst the German warships between 1815 and 1945 only one motorboat of the Kriegsmarine was called Ahoi. It was adopted in 1940, so it probably already had that name, and it drove on the Kiel Canal. In June 1945 the former owner, J. Pieper & Co., took possession of it again. The catapult ship Bussard, on duty in 1942, was sold in 1947 as USA War looting to the Belgian shipping company Heygen in Ghent, and renamed Ahoy.
From 1940 to 1943 the Phänomen-Werke Gustav Hiller company manufactured 125cc motor scooters for the German Wehrmacht in Zittau, under the name Phänomen Ahoi.
"Nebel - ahoi!" is used by the ABC-Abwehrtruppe, a defence division of the Bundeswehr, and it belongs officially to the military tradition of the army. The expression originated among the Nebeltruppe, a Wehrmacht brigade group from 1935, whose job it was to create a chemical fog over a battlefield before destroying the target areas with mass fire. The expression originated in a moment of euphoria, after the fog successfully covered its target.
However, there is a lack of direct evidence that links the origin of ahoi to the particle a and the noun hoie. In Dutch linguistics the call is thought to be an adaption from English. This is indicated by the amount of evidence found in English and the lack thereof in Dutch, as well as criticism of the idea that in the Early Modern Period a word could be formed from a simple expression for a ship.
The relation of ahoi and hoi, which is a common form of address in Dutch, is unclear. Hoi, which had been proven to be an exclamation of joy as early as 1552, could also be a short form of ahoi or ahoi could be an extension of hoi. Most likely hoi belongs to a group of calls such as hó and hé and is not closely related to ahoi at all.
The sources for earlier uses of the term are lacking, because ahoi did not get its own lemma in the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT), even though this comprehensive dictionary includes interjections. In addition later editions of the WNT from recent decades lack this entry. The earliest entries of forms of ahoi in the WNT can be found around 1900. The author Tine van Berken wrote "A-hoi! A-hoi! riep Beer onvermoeid, de hand trechters gewijze aan de mond", which roughly translates as "A-hoi! A-hoi! called Beer relentlessly...", in a book for girls that was published in 1897. In 1908 author George Frans Haspels wrote "met donderend ahoei", "with thundering ahoy", referring to the forces of a storm that hit the coast. Here the meaning was extended to refer to noise. If Haspel was alluding to the sound of the wind, the spelling ahoei, which is pronounced a, contains an onomatopoeic element.
In the 1950s ahoi was considered outdated. However, the expression was still generally known. Evidence for the use of ahoy in Friesian are lacking in comprehensive dictionaries of that language.
Charlois is the place of origin of the Tamboer- en Trompetterkorps Ahoy, the Tambour- and Trumpetcorps Ahoy, founded in 1955. We do not know whether it was called this because the term ahoy expressed the sense of reconstruction in Rotterdam at the time and was already outdated in a maritime context.
The marching band first performed on the Koninginnedag (Queens' Day) in 1956 and became more popularly known because of their innovative formations, their previously uncommon antiphonal singing and faster marching music. In 1962 they won first prize at the Wereld Muziek Concours in Kerkrade and later played at the Sanremo Music Festival. The group split up in 2003 because of a lack of successors. The Show-Musikkorps Ahoy-Hamburg was founded in Hamburg in 1975.
In at least Swedish, there have been some interchange with åhej! (heave-ho!).
These groups formed a romantic opposition against the nationalistic Czech middle-class*. The Czech Sokol movement with its preference for traditional gymnastics did not fit the adolenscent's spirit of optimism and progress, which cultivated an internationally and trendily* perceived sport with its own greeting. They positioned their form of ahoj from sailors, which possibly coming from the lower parts of Germany, against Sokol's nazdar, Czech for hail. Nazdar was used in general across the Czech and Czechoslovak society, but within a few decades, the modern-day ahoj replaced this old-fashioned expression.
The Czech and Slovak ironic love of language contributed to the distribution of ahoj. In Slovakia ahoj-derivates are used in variety of different scenarios, such as the diminutive "ahojček", as a toast "ahojka", to a greater extent the plural-form "ahojte", as well as the grammatically correct we-form "ahojme sa".Braňo Hochel: Slovník slovenského slangu (Wörterbuch des slowakischen Slangs). Bratislava 1993, , s. v. ahoj In Czech as well as in Slovak ahoj is being slowly replaced by the modern-day form "čau", which comes from the Italian greeting ciao. This has been perceived to be the case since the Czechoslovak government allowed the Italian films to be shown in the 1960s.Dietmar Bartz: Wie das Ahoj nach Böhmen kam. In: mare, Die Zeitschrift der Meere.
Heft 21, 2000, S. 36. Vgl. die Mitteilung des aus der Slowakei
stammenden Ingenieurs Frank Bures, Universität Toronto, Newsgroup
soc.culture.czecho-slovak vom 22. April 1998
Ahoj is the official name of a district in Nové Mesto which is a part of the Slovak capital city Bratislava., aufgerufen am 7. August 2012 Adolescents met there before the Second World War, when the region was barely built.Dem
Denkmalpfleger Otto Doško zufolge "erhielt der Ort seinen Name dank der
Skauti, die sich hier während der Ersten Republik aufhielten. Sie
begrüßten sich untereinander mit dem Gruß ahoj. Auch die Schenke, in der
sich die Skauti trafen, nannte sich Ahojka." [http://bratislava.sme.sk/c/2760291/Ahoj-coskoro-skonci-s-cisternami.html Bericht der Tageszeitung ''Sme'', 13. Juni 2006], aufgerufen am 18. November 2008. Zu ''Ahojka'' siehe oben den Abschnitt ''nazdar, ahoj, čao''.
The car manufacturer Skoda called its prototype for a city car Škoda Ahoj! in 2001.AutoRevue.cz vom 15. Februar 2002; , aufgerufen am 7. August 2012
The Simpsons character Mr. Burns uses the term ahoy-hoy as a greeting while Australian comedian duo Hamish and Andy has used the term ahoy as the shows preferred greeting after finding out Graham-Bell wanted the term to be used following the invention of the telephone.
Acronyms
When Czechia and Slovakia, called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was occupied by Germany in the 1930s, ahoj could be understood as an acronym for the watchword "Adolfa Hitlera oběsíme jistě", English - "We'll hang Adolf Hitler for sure." Under the communist government ahoj developed into an acronym in the Slovak part of the country. Since the struggle between the Church and the State from 1950 it was used as an acronym to console people in hardship Aj hriešnych ochraňuje Ježiš, English Jesus also protects the sinners, or for the Latin ad honorem Jesu, English For the glory of Jesus. Demonstratively catholic adolescents use it amongst themselves. Even priests used it to address the congregation from the pulpit.
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