Aloha to you

What the word carries

Aloha is not one thing translated into another. In Pukui and Elbert's Hawaiian Dictionary the entry runs to a dozen and more senses: love, affection, compassion, mercy, sympathy, pity, kindness, grace, charity. It is also the greeting and the parting, which means it is what you say to someone you have just met and to someone you will not see again.

Duke's own gloss takes one of those senses, love, and puts it to work as hospitality. That is his reading, offered in his own words, and it is the only reading this site puts forward in its own voice.

There is a widely taught explanation that breaks the word into alo, presence or the face of a thing, and hā, breath, giving something like the presence of breath, and connecting it to the greeting in which two people press noses and share air. It is taught by Hawaiian practitioners and it is worth knowing. It is a cultural teaching rather than a settled linguistic derivation, and comparative evidence from other Polynesian languages points elsewhere. Both of those things are true at once and we would rather say so than pick the tidier version.

Aloha ʻāina, love of the land, is a different matter again and not a decorative one. It names a political tradition: the petitions against annexation, and a century of Hawaiian movements since. It is not available as a brand value and this site does not reach for it.

What we are not going to do here

There is a version of this page that reduces aloha to five values with a tidy acronym. It usually comes from a 1986 addition to Hawaiʻi state law which instructs public officials to consider the word in the conduct of their duties. That statute is real and it is interesting as legislative history. It is not an ancestral definition, and reciting it as one is the clearest sign that a page was written by someone from outside.

This site is published by a company that is not Kanaka Maoli. Explaining a word in a living language is not our work to do, and a page that put us in the teacher's chair would be taking something while appearing to give it.

So this page does the two things we can honestly do. It sets out what Duke said, in his words, with the caveats attached. And it points away from itself.

Where to read instead

These are the places a reader should go, and they are better than anything we could write.

• Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary. The standard reference, and the entry for aloha is longer than most people expect.
• Mary Kawena Pukui, ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings. Bishop Museum Press. Nearly three thousand sayings, with the sense in which each was used.
• Pukui, Haertig and Lee, Nānā i ke Kumu: Look to the Source. Hawaiian concepts explained by Hawaiians, at length.
• The Hawaiian language programmes at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and at Hilo, and the Hawaiian-medium schools. If you want to learn the language rather than read about it, that is the door.