Togod

I was almost this many days old when I learned about adieu and adios, the fare-thee-well words in French and Spanish, respectively. Learned what, exactly? That they are both concatenations of the word for to and the word for God in their respective languages–a dieu and a dios. It’s an ellipsis, I think.

As we part,
I commend you to God’s care.

Now, I know French and Spanish well enough to know their words for God independently, but somehow–Mon Dieu!  Ay Dios!–I never made the connection.  I never saw the last four letters of adieu and adios as absorbed words, which says something about how I learn other languages. Not. Very. Well.

Anyway, I learned English pretty good but I didn’t know why English speakers don’t do the same as French and Spanish speakers.  (To speak a language is not necessarily to know anything about it.) So, why *don’t* we use togod when we want to say adios?

Apparently the English goodbye comes from God be with ye, which was abbreviated as godbwye in the sign-off to letters in the late 16th century. From there it drifted into goodbye, and here we are. It’s culturally the same as the French and Spanish words, it just got built up differently.

That got me wondering about other languages: Do they say the functional equivalent of godbwye or something else entirely? Does someone, somewhere, have a completely different default?

Hit the road, Jack,
and don’t come back no more, no more.

Not surprisingly, there are ample online resources to answer this question. Outrageously, there doesn’t seem to be one site that exactly answers all of it. But here’s what I got by toggling between a “How do you say?” site and a whole bunch of “Where did that word come from?” sites.

Three main streams emerged.

First, there’s the one we already know about and participate in: I commend you to God or God be with you when you’re not with me (not that I’m saying that God isn’t with both of us right here, right now, but I just wanted to be clear that I want that to continue for you also and not to seem to presume to appropriate it for myself without in any way suggesting that I think I need to keep an eye on God). Some examples:

• addio – Italian
• adeus – Portuguese
• adjö and adjø – Swedish and Norwegian, from the French adieu
• farewell – English (archaic)
• khudā hāfez – Farsi (may God be your guardian)
• sbohem – Czech (with God – with, to, those little words are always pesky)
• shalom or shalom Aleichem – Hebrew (literally, peace or peace be with you)

Second, there’s a stream of until we meet again or pretty close to that:

• au revoir – French
• auf wiedersehen – German
• arrivederci – Italian
• do svidaniya – Russian (with similar-sounding variants in  Croatian, Polish, Slovene, Ukrainian . . .)
• näkemiin – Finnish
• totsiens – Afrikaans
• tesutyun -Armenian
• viszontlátásra – Hungarian
• sayonara – Japanese
• zàijiàn – Chinese (that’s when they’re not saying bye-bye)
  

Without doing the work to find Someone Who Knows, I can only say that I suspect that these two streams might be one. I’m thinking that they’re both a shorthand form of the same thought, with different cultures just picking up different ends.

Until we meet again
may God be with you.

It’s like soda pop: Americans picked up soda; Canadians picked up pop. We’re both talking about the same healthful beverage.

Third, there are what could be one-offs:

• aloha – Hawaiian (presence of breath/life, which might be a wish for continued breath/life or a recognition of common/shared life, à la one interpretation of namaste, below)
• ciao – Italian (your servant, more or less). Ciao jumped into Italian (and other languages besides) from s-ciào vostro or s-ciào su, literally (I am) your slave in a Venetian dialect.
• namaste –  Hindi ([this is me] bowing to you) or, as some say, The divine in me recognizes the divine in you.

All these last three examples can be used as hello and goodbye which maybe accounts for them being generic marks of respect–it’s always a good idea to pre-empt the possibility of bad feelings at the outset–but many of the examples above have this dual use, too. In any event, there’s more than one way to categorize these words: meaning is one, function would be another.

Many languages (Most? All? Where is that Someone Who Knows?) have multiple options for words-of-parting. German apparently has 13 standard ways to say goodbye and just this brief review turned up three for Italian. Some of the variation arises for shades of meaning: Am I saying goodbye until later today, until next week, or for what could be a lifetime? Some variation arises for formal/informal usage, both situational and those related to age or other social differences. In English, I might say See ya to a teenager but not to a boss or to a centenarian (unless we were good friends). (I was gonna go with octogenarian but realized that they’re not that much older anymore.) And maybe I wouldn’t say it to the teenager if the separation was going to be a long one. Or maybe I would if the separation was going to be a long one–indeed, if a reunion was highly uncertain–and I wanted to make light of it.

Yikes. It’s complicated, eh? But maybe only superficially. At bottom, whatever language we speak, whatever word or phrase we use, we’re all wishing something good for the other person, even if it isn’t always clear exactly what. In today’s world–maybe in every day’s world–that seems like something worth appreciating. So with that happy thought, I bid all of ye adieu and a fond farewell. Take it easy. Have a nice day. Ta ta. I am outta here: Togod and all that. And oh yeah, godbwye.