The word "the" serves a similar purpose, to reset the vocal tract so the next word can be resolved more easily than if it was following an arbitrary word.
[citation needed]
There are good reasons for saying hello.
31–40 of 40 posts
Re: There are good reasons for saying hello.
#32Wait, people would just call somewhere and say the extension? That sounds awfully rude to me. Wouldn't you normally say, "Hi, can I have extension 432, please?" It does the same thing the article says, but you sound like a decent human being.
What it reminded me of is when, after waiting on hold forever, the CSR says something like: "Thanks for calling ABC Company. What's your account number?" or "What is your phone number?" Having the first "words" a customer utters be numbers is probably not the best idea. I wonder how many hours of waiting on hold could be eliminated if more companies understood this phenomena. I also wonder if the full word "hello," w…
How hard would it be to manufacture a little device that plugged into the phone line (or just listened with a built-in microphone) and displayed the digits/dial-tones coming over the line on a seven-segment display? Then the CSR could just ask you to dial your information in, then read it and use it as normal.
Re: There are good reasons for saying hello.
#33Wait, people would just call somewhere and say the extension? That sounds awfully rude to me. Wouldn't you normally say, "Hi, can I have extension 432, please?" It does the same thing the article says, but you sound like a decent human being.
What it reminded me of is when, after waiting on hold forever, the CSR says something like: "Thanks for calling ABC Company. What's your account number?" or "What is your phone number?" Having the first "words" a customer utters be numbers is probably not the best idea. I wonder how many hours of waiting on hold could be eliminated if more companies understood this phenomena. I also wonder if the full word "hello," w…
With something like Twilio I don't think you have any excuse for this part of the interaction: play a recorded greeting saying "Hiya, for fastest service, type in your account number . If you don't know your account number, hit 0 and one of our operators can help you look it up." If you get their account number, pick the appropriate CSR, bring up the details directly on their screen, forward the call and drop them straight into "Thanks for calling FooCorp. This is Melinda. To whom am I speaking please?" Hears customer name, a necessary formality because many accounts have multiple people in charge of them -- the most common situation in B2C is husband and wife. "Thanks for calling Mr. Smith. What can I help you with?" If Mr. Smith says his last order didn't ship yet, Melinda is a single keystroke away from pulling it up.
Ooh, the possibilities with Twilio make me giddy. If I can only productize one of them... (Crikey, the possibilities for per-company customization are endless. Do customers ever call you? You should be using Twilio.)
Re: There are good reasons for saying hello.
#34I fully support being polite, but there's a lot more to vowels than relative pitch. When speaking a vowel, the geometry of your mouth creates multiple resonant frequencies. The ratio among those frequencies is far more important than the ratio of the dominant frequency of one vowel to the dominant frequency of the next. Consider a couple of examples: 1. A trombone can't say "I Owe You", despite the fact that it can p…
"there's a lot more to vowels than relative pitch."
I agree with everything else you said, but your own words seem to bring us to the conclusion that pitch has nothing at all to do with distinguishing vowels (in languages in which pitch alone cannot be used to distinguish words).
Re: There are good reasons for saying hello.
#35The word "the" serves a similar purpose, to reset the vocal tract so the next word can be resolved more easily than if it was following an arbitrary word.
[citation needed]
Re: There are good reasons for saying hello.
#36I upvoted this because I would love to see more linguistics-related posts come through HN.
Re: There are good reasons for saying hello.
#37Are you sure this isn't a troll? It's so easily disprovable. Here's a sound clip of an adult male speaking, followed by a young boy. Do you honestly have trouble understanding the number the boy says? http://soi.kd6.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sound.mp3
I did, for what it's worth. I was able to make out "five" only by replaying the sound a couple times in my head.
Re: There are good reasons for saying hello.
#38Wait, people would just call somewhere and say the extension? That sounds awfully rude to me. Wouldn't you normally say, "Hi, can I have extension 432, please?" It does the same thing the article says, but you sound like a decent human being.
Personally I would have said "432, thank you" which would have been more polite, but still wouldn't have helped.
Re: There are good reasons for saying hello.
#39nevermind the fact that saying 'hello' is considered polite... But I still like this article :)
Re: There are good reasons for saying hello.
#40this is particularly true (in my limited experience) if you're not a native speaker - saying something like "hello i'd like to talk to extension 123" gives people a chance to figure out your accent. also, like smiling, saying something friendly encourages people to make an effort to understand you.
I wonder if attention plays a part. I have noticed that people can interpret what I say if I start with a grunt or other vocal sound, but if I start off with the thing I want to say immediately, I have to start over. I realize that it can be explained by this "human brain interprets your two syllables" idea, but if a mere grunt also does the trick, this suggests to me that attention plays at least as much an importan…
To me too, it seems attention is of more importance here. It seems the author has a degree in linguistics (http://www.esmerel.com/wagons/ann/), so I won't dismiss this theory easily, but the lack of any citations or references in the submitted page looks suspicious.