[HPforGrownups] Re:Alohomora

[Jen Faulkner]

No: HPFGUIDX 23250

On Mon, 30 Jul 2001 rcraigharman at hotmail.com wrote:

> > >One more Alohomora problem: where does that word come from? 

> While I'm willing to grant that Aloha is as good of a source as any,
> I think it bears repeating that "Aloo" (second o is an omega, first
> o is an omicron) is a 2d person imperative (command) form of the
> verb alaomai in Greek, meaning roughly "Leave!", "Begone!", "Stray!"
> 
> If that were the source, it would roughly translate as "Go away,
> impediment!" which seems reasonable....

A good meaning for the spellword, but honestly, I don't see how you can
twist a Greek etymology out like that.

'Alaomai' doesn't mean 'leave' or 'be gone', but 'wander', 'roam
about'.  It can mean 'to be exiled', yes, but it still has, I think, a
sense then of 'wander about as an exile', unable to settle anywhere on
account of being an outcast.  It refers to a state of being ('be an
outcast') rather than a finite act ('leave to become an exile').  This
is nitpicky, I know, but I think it makes a difference.

But on the level of form, I really don't see how one could derive
'aloha' from 'aloô'.  The vowels aren't the same.  (The first o in
'aloô' is short, the second long.)  'Alaho' I could see as being
related, but not 'aloha'.  Then there's the problem with the aspiration
in the middle.  Greek linguistics is *not* something I know much about
(she said with ridiculous understatement), but orthographically there's
certainly no aspiration in vowels in the middle of words, and there
isn't any in standard modern (American method) pronunciation either.  It
seems like JKR's 'aloha' would have to come from some other root, since
none of her other spellwords have such twisting around of the root, do
they?

'Alaomai' isn't a particularly common Greek verb, either, certainly not
the first one I would think of when trying to express the idea of
'leave'. *shrugs* English-Greek dictionaries aren't exactly common,
unless one has access to a university library or happens to own one
(from a Greek prose composition class), so it's that much more difficult
to use Greek as the etymological basis for spellwords.  It's possible
that JKR remembered the 'al' root from reading Lysias or Aeschylus or
someone ('alaomai' does occur in a few texts likely to be read in
school), and came up with 'aloha', but in all I think 'aloha' coming
from the Hawaiian greeting more likely.

--jen :)

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