Was Old English "ēalās" equivalent to Modern English "hello"?

Solution 1:

Eala could be a vocative, but it wasn't a standalone greeting like hello functions now.

I am not familiar with eala being used as a greeting in Old English. According to the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary, eala was an interjection that could sometimes be translated O and sometimes alas. I have mostly seen it in that context. Very occasionally eala(s) could be ale (BT entry) or temple (BT entry; the nominative is ealh, and the Old English Translator shows ealas as the nominative/genitive accusative).

In the scholarship I've found, eala is treated as an interjection often used with the vocative.

Beechy, Tiffany. “Eala Earendel: Extraordinary Poetics in Old English.” Modern Philology, vol. 108, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/656221.

• Beechy focuses on parsing earendel; eala is treated as a translation of O, i.e. O oriens ~ eala earendel. (O Dawn!)

Clayton, Mary. “The Old English ‘Promissio Regis.’” Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 37, 2008, pp. 91–150. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44510974.

• Clayton treats eala as an introduction to address in the phrases eola leof hlaford and eola leofan men; O dear lord or O dear men. However, I get no sense of greeting, and Clayton never distinguishes a meaning like alas or O from a meaning like hello.

Hiltunen, Risto. "Eala, geferan and gode wyrhtan": On Interjections in Old English." Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell. Wiley, 2006. https://books.google.com/books?id=W1l_BwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA99&ots=NwzCdHvJwY&dq=%22eala%20leofan%20men%22&pg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false.

• Hiltunen analyzes a few interjections in Old English. Eala often initiates an address, especially when followed by noun phrases in a vocative case. Towards the end of a section on eala on p. 100, Hiltunen says this: "Both materials (Offerberg's study of interjections and the Helsinki Corpus) indicate the importance of eala for signalling audience attention to the message being conveyed." Signalling audience attention is more of a rhetorical move in sermons or homilies than a greeting.

So the issue here is that eala, at least in the texts we have, isn't like saying hello (e.g. Wes hāl). It's not a greeting. It is not even necessarily a lament, as alas has become in English. As far as I know, it does not even function alone as hello does. ("Hello!") It is a call to attention.