history
The past tense of greet is greeted. This is known.
However my instinct suggests it should be something like great/gret (first spelling seeming more right though easy to confuse ).
I'm certain I can remember hearing people in the north of Britain saying gret.
Is there any validity at all to this word as a dialectical or previously acceptable form?
Or am I merely guilty of some phenomena where I misapply rules?
How do ye / How do you do / Howdy?
From the etymology.com page on howdy:
howdy 1840, first recorded in Southern U.S. dialect, contraction of how do you do (1630s), phrase inquiring after someone's health; earlier how do ye (1560s).
Note that a search for "how do you do" in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (1810s - 2000s) in particular brings results that are from the early 1810s (see number of occurrences per decade below). This supports that the usage of "how do you do" precedes the year in which Americans started greeting with "hi" according to etymonline.com (1862).
Similar searches in the COHA for "how do ye do" and "howdy" support that also their usage was prior to when "hi" started being used as a greeting.
Hal / Hail
Disclaimer: no evidence that these words were used in America. What follows is more like an interesting note on the history of greetings in English:
The book Speech acts in the history of English dedicates an entire chapter to greetings in English language history. Among the greetings that it covers, I would say that the closest one to hi! in spelling and usage is hail! The author describes hail as the Middle English daughter form of the Old English interjection hal. Hal! would literally mean health!.
You can browse the book here in Google Books.
Yes, fornication once did mean arching or vaulting in English. The OED has it dating from 1703 in Richard Neve's The city and countrey purchaser, and builder's dictionary: or, The compleat builder's guide:
Fornication, In Architecture, is an Arching, or Vaulting.
The etymology shows it coming directly from Latin. The entry isn't marked as archaic or obsolete, but it is marked as an 'Architecture' term, so not really in common use.
However, the meaning of 'sexual intercourse between a[n unmarried] man and an unmarried woman' is much older in English, dating to before 1300 in Cursor Mundi: a Northumbrian poem of the 14th century:
Þis sin [lechery] has branches fele..fornicacion es an.
The OED also has a 1303 quotation from Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne:
‘Fornycacyoun’ [ys], whan two vnweddyde haue mysdoun.
This comes via Old French from late Latin.
Best Answer
Bosworth-Toller indicates that the long vowel in Old English grétan was retained in the past tense and participle, with gemination (doubling) of the /t/.
The U.Michigan Middle English Dictionary cites (with modern diacritics to indicate conjectured pronunciations) the spellings grette, grætte, gratte & grẹ̄t, grē̆t, greite & (late & rare) grẹ̄ted, which suggest that from the 12th to the 15th century pronunciation varied between long and short, with the short appearing to be more common. The modern regularized form greeted seems to have arisen in the last part of the 15th century—that is, after the Great Vowel Shift had started.
I would not be surprised, then, to find pasts like gret or grat lingering in some dialects; but I find no direct evidence of that. The English Dialect Dictionary does give orthographic graet, grat, greeted, greht, gret, gruot; but these are all associated with the unrelated northern (Yorkshire to the Islands) verb greet in the sense “weep”.