One of my Hawaiians co workers just passed this along:
ha=breath.
Aloha means "to be with breath". Hawaiians used to put there faces close to each other and breathe each others breath as a greeting and before parting.
Haole [term for non-Hawaian person]. Means without breath, because they shake hands to say hello.
Is this true?
My research indicates that that this is folk etymology.
Breath is hÄ (or aho or hanu). Haole, whose historical meaning is foreign in general, appears to have come from a much broader application to foreign objects and places, and has recently specialized to mean white people.
The mark over the Ä of hÄ, the kahakÅ, is both phonetic and phonemic. That is, it makes the word hÄ sound different from -ha- (without kahakÅ) mostly by increasing the duration of the vowel. Mostly foreigners confuse words by ignoring the kahakÅ. So the folk etymologies appear to be inside jokes, because they rely on the confusion of hÄ and the -ha- parts of aloha and haole.
Kind of on a par with Hofstadter's observation from Italian:
ami (you love) + amo (I love) = amiamo (we love)
That is great, and a new one on me. If it came from GEB, I must have forgotten it.
This sort of poking at foreigners by intentionally mangling the unique or difficult features of one's own language is not original. I have heard several Chinese people, instead of the greeting question "ni3 hao3 ma0?" (Are you well? / How are you?), say to foreigners "ni3 hao3 ma3" (You are a good horse) deliberately mangling the tones, as foreigners often do.
Glenn said:
This sort of poking at foreigners by intentionally mangling the unique or difficult features of one's own language is not original. I have heard several Chinese people, instead of the greeting question "ni3 hao3 ma0?" (Are you well? / How are you?), say to foreigners "ni3 hao3 ma3" (You are a good horse) deliberately mangling the tones, as foreigners often do.
I have heard the same thing in Danish. A family I visited substituted "skal vi bide en boenne?" (shall we bite a bean?) for "skal vi bede en boen?" (shall we pray a prayer).