Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer
Reading a little more, I find it interesting that 'aloha' means 'warm feeling' or 'love' and can be used when discussing any of that. I always thought it simply meant a greeting...
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It is decades since I read these stories so I cannot comment directly on them. However, my wife speaks a number of the Polynesian languages and a very, very little rubs off on me (just a little smudge so bear with me if I get tangled up
). One of the differences between them is that they use different alphabets so, for example:
In Samoan "aloha" becomes "alofa", there being no "h" in Samoan (and there is no "f" in Hawaiian).
In New Zealand and Cook Island Maori "aloha" becomes "aroha", there being no "l" in Maori (and there is no "r" in Hawaiian).
Tongan drifts away from the differing by consonant trick and love is truncated instead to being just " 'ofa" (Tonga and Samoa are close geographically). Tahitian drifts even further away to a different word.
"Aroha" as a greeting in Hawaii seems to be a Hawaiian thing (and have just checked for sure with my wife on the following) as "alofa" is not used as a greeting in Samoan, a common greeting is very close though as it is "talofa". And in Maori neither "aroha", or anything close to it, is used as a greeting. But they do have the other various meanings of "aroha" along the lines of love, affection, compassion, pity, approval.
In Tahitian a common greeting is "ia orana" but as, similarly to Hawaiian, Tahitian does have "l" and "h" in its alphabet we don't know if orana and aloha have a common root (I suspect not as Polynesia had no written language so a pronunciation comparison between aloha and orana seems fraught to me).
Lots of words like this across Polynesia, similar and tracing the migrations, and all very easy to get mixed up, for me anyway
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