Comments on: “How are you” and “have you eaten yet?” https://talesacrossthesea.net/51/how-are-you-and-have-you-eaten-yet/ 海外奇谈　　　Good Vibrations, Better Translations: Fun Chinese Stuff in English　　　海外奇谈 Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:28:57 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.41 By: ram https://talesacrossthesea.net/51/how-are-you-and-have-you-eaten-yet/comment-page-1/#comment-187 Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:20:22 +0000 http://talesacrossthesea.net/?p=51#comment-187 It is interesting how greetings originate. In Telugu, the language spoken in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India, a common greeting is “Bagun nara?”, which translates to “Are you well?”. I wonder if this is a British influence.

]]> By: Mei https://talesacrossthesea.net/51/how-are-you-and-have-you-eaten-yet/comment-page-1/#comment-182 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:58:17 +0000 http://talesacrossthesea.net/?p=51#comment-182 I think all these greetings went through a process during which they slowly lost their original intentions. Recently people started to use other variations, such as “忙吗？(busy?)”, and most are actually mildly interested in the content of the reply — this usually leads to a mutual update of recent status. I can imagine this greeting to become more and more of a formality, until it’s exactly the same as “have you eaten”, just a sound made to show friendship.

The English version is sometimes shortened to “howdy”, and doesn’t seem to require any response at all.

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