Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ha'ole

I'm listing Ha'ole not because I think it needs to go, but because User:Zora has been blanking it. I've told her it needs to go here.

Now, I'm not sure what her problem is with the article. It may be that she thinks it's a misspelling (Ha'ole for Haole). I hope she comes here so we can discuss this. &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 22:31, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi folks. The problem is that one user was propagating a common folk etymology for the Hawaiian language/Hawaiian pidgin term haole. In the Hawaiian language, haole means 'foreign'. In pidgin, it means 'white' or 'Caucausian' and is often said with a sneer (by non-Caucasians).

There is a folk belief that haole is composed of two Hawaiian words, ha and ole, ha meaning 'breath' and ole meaning 'not'. The explanation is that whites don't do the honi, the Polynesian/Hawaiian cheek-sniffing, and so they were described as 'breathless'. The implication is that haoles are aloof and ignorant -- which is what a lot of 'locals' think of haoles in any case.

This folk etymology is completely bogus. First of all, there are innumerable citations from Hawaiian showing that haole simply means 'foreign'. Including words like haole 'ele'ele for a dark-skinned foreigner. Second, the word 'breath' is ha (with a macron or kahako over the a), not plain ha. The word 'not' is 'ole, with a glottal stop or 'okina, not ole, which means 'fang'. Only someone who had didn't speak Hawaiian, and knew it only through the old missionary spelling that didn't include kahakos and 'okinas, would come up with such an etymology.

The usual response to this criticism is to claim that the original word was ha'ole, and that haole is just a variant. No reputable Hawaiian linguist believes this, as there are no citations for the word and the proposed change is not consonant with other sound changes undergone by Hawaiian over the centuries as it evolved away from a hypothetical proto-east-polynesian ancestor.

The fictitious word ha'ole was added to Wikipedia by Ilikea (who seems to have left in a huff, despite numerous messages from me urging a face-to-face meeting in Honolulu so we can thrash out our differences) in an attempt to bolster the folk etymology. Since I've deleted the folk etymology from haole, I don't think there's any need for ha'ole. Certainly not for a whole page devoted to it.

I've left any mention of the folk etymology off the haole page (I wasn't going to put a lot of effort into the page until the edit wars were over) but I can copy the 'folk etymology' explanation onto the haole page so that anyone looking for it can find it. I don't think they'd be looking under ha'ole in any case!

Zora 22:55, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * No vote: Blanking a page without discussion on VfD is entirely inappropriate, and can lead to the user being blocked from editing.  If you have problems with the content of the page, you can edit it to correct the content, but don't just blank.  RickK


 * Redirect with an explanation at haole as to why "ha'ole" is used and why it is wrong. -Sean Curtin 00:31, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * We should decide which form is correct, then incorporate the content from the other article into that one, then make the wrong one a redirect to the right one. I have no opinion about which is correct, because I don't know Hawaiian/Hawai'ian.    &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 00:56, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Keep and redirect as above. You didn't need to bring the page here. Although you cannot blank a page without discussion on VfD, it is quite legal and acceptable and common to change a page to a redirect and to merge its data (which accomplishes much the same thing as blanking but without leaving a blank, orphaned article). Common misspellings and alternative spellings are good reasons for redirects in any case. Making the article into a redirect and providing a good discussion in Haole with arguments on both sides helps insure that another separate Ha'ole won't be created and is better for convincing people that the matter is known about and has been looked at. Just saying it has been disproved is hardly enough, if others believe strongly that it hasn't. Your discussion on the matter in this page (which I find reasonably convincing as one who has a degree of linguistic knowledge) should probably be revised and inserted into the Haole article. The best defense is an NPOV discussion in the page. You don't have to say the etymology is wrong if you instead show the difficulties in supporting it. Jallan 01:04, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Zora, by all means write your account and explanation on the page's Discussion link and, if you feel that it is vital, please insert a {disputed} tag on the page that will direct readers to the discussion. I think your account is compelling and persuasive, but your actions are destructive.  Please try to help out our readers and fellow editors by using the Talk pages so that we can agree. Geogre 02:18, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Redirect: I'm on the fence about the redirect. I almost think having some account of how disputed the word is is helpful to those mistakenly searching this way, which is why the Discussion tab might have allowed it, after paring down the patently and provably false information.  (In other words, it sounds like it's important that people know why they got redirected and what kind of mistake is involved, though that can be covered in the Haole article. Geogre 03:56, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I did not intend my actions to be destructive. I simply did not understand how deletions worked. I've never run into this sort of problem before now -- in my whole three or four month Wikipedia history :/ I have reworked the haole article to include the folk etymology. Can the ha'ole article now be cut down to a redirect to haole? It includes some incredibly strange woo-woo Huna stuff and I hate to think of someone actually taking it seriously.

I should add that ha'ole is a purely hypothetical word that is NOT used. Some responders here seem to think that it's an actual word. No, it's just a guess about the past, like the various versions of 'Indo-European' that linguists have hypothesized.

I'll end with a question: where, o where, do I find a link to the escaped characters that Wikipedia uses for non-Latin-1 characters? I can never remember the code for the glottal stop, and I'd need ten codes (upper and lower case for a, e, i, o, u) to do the kahakos correctly. The codes I've seen don't look like the standard HTML codes (&#699 for the Hawaiian glottal stop, frex). Zora 02:43, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * &#256;&#257; &#274;&#275; &#298;&#299; &#332;&#333; &#362;&#363; &#699; or &lsquo;
 * These should do the job.   &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 07:49, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Thanks ever so much. So they ARE the regular HTML codes. I've pasted an aide-memoire on my own page, and I think I'll make a little list (!) to hang up above my computer. I'll need them when I make an HTML version of Ka Mo'olelo o La'ieikawai for Distributed Proofreaders.  Zora 09:39, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * You'll find most of the information you need just by looking it up on Wikipedia itself. For example, Kahako and 'Okina.   &mdash; Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 10:43, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Comment Wait. So you're saying that ha'ole is two actual Hawaiian words that translate to no breath and that have a common folk etymology and linguists dispute this? Sounds article-worthy to me. The Steve 18:34, Aug 9, 2004 (UTC)


 * Nononononono. Haole is the word that is used thousands of times a day, spelled and pronounced without a long vowel or glottal stop. H&#257;&#699;ole is the hypothetical, postulated word that means "breathless" that defenders of the folk etymology say evolved into the ordinary word, by the dropping of the long vowel and glottal stop. Since there is no evidence that h&#257;&#699;ole ever existed, it's Ptolemaic epicycle kind of explanation, summoned out of nowhere to rescue a failing theory.    Zora 18:59, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Make into a redirect to Haole. -- Infrogmation 20:43, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)