I saw this in an airport and it reads as ハイ which at least in hiragana, translates to “yes”, but in this context was supposed to be used as “hello” Does the change in kana change the translation of the word or does ハイmean “hello” under certain context?

16 comments

1. Katakana means it’s generally a word from another language.

   In this case, English.

   What word in English sounds like “hai”? Oh! Hi!

2. [deleted]

3. I think its supposed to say “hi”

4. はい

5. Fine, comment removed.

   This has become an unpleasant sub.

6. It says “Hi”

7. Mostl likely it’s the English word ‘Hi’ written in Katakana. Loaned words are usually written in Katakana plus the word はい (yes) is never used to greet someone.

8. You guys are overthinking this. Someone looked it up in a dictionary and got the wrong answer. My favorite of these was a Western Union that had “money transfers” in many languages but the Japanese text was お金を送りなさい.

9. sometime they say … ヘロ. HELLO

10. Phonetically spelling “hi”, a strange choice to be sure but correct

11. You’re assuming that there’s some multilingual expert who knows all the languages of the world and has given much thought before printing the decals in all the languages of the world

12. It’s not hiragana but katakana, used to phonetically spell “hi”. It’s completely normal. katakana is often/mainly used to spell foreign words.

13. [deleted]

14. It should be こんにちは

15. This is written in Katakana, not Hiragana.
    Katakana is used to transliterate foreign words by sound. For instance, computer is written as “コンピュータ” (Konpyuta). In this specific case, “ハイ” is read as “Hi”!

16. that’s katakana isn’t it?