My understanding of the print() in both Python and Ruby (and other languages) is that it is a method on a string (or other types). Because it is so commonly used the syntax:

print "hi"

works.

So why doesn't "hi".print() in Python or "hi".print in Ruby work?

When you do something like "hi".print(), you are implying that the string object "hi" has a method print. This is not the case. Instead, print is a function that takes a string (or other types) as input.