How!

[VOORHIS at BrandonU.CA]

 Koontz John E wrote:
> I've always thought this was an interesting form.  Because it is so
> widespread (though I have no idea precisely how widespread), I've tended
> to suspect that it might be pre-Contact.  Greetings in h-back vowel are
> certainly fairly common in Europe, too, perhaps without inheritance,
> though I've not seen anything on the subject.  However, hau certainly also
> looks like an English loan, i.e., from "How (do you do)?"  I imagine it
> might be possible to document the progress of the term, it it is a loan,
> though I don't know of any relevant comments, and it might be difficult to
> get past misconceptions on the part of the recordists.  By the way, add
> Hopi to the list of languages with hau.

Just to complicate things, a widespread Cree greeting is ta:nsi and a
widespread Ojibwe one is a:ni:n.  Both of these are literally 'how?' and are
assumed by native speakers to be short for 'How are you?', 'How are things
going?' or the like.  So did the popular Indian English greeting "how!" arise
as a translation of these Cree and Ojibwe words, possibly to be passed on
thereafter from English to Siouan, Iroquoian and Algonquian languages (+ Hopi)
as hau, etc., or was hau borrowed from one of those languages into English as
"how" which was then translated into Cree and Ojibwe?  Note that other Cree and
Ojibwe greetings are borrowed, Cree wa:ciyi from English 'what cheer?' and
Ojibwe po:s^o: from French bon jour.
	Paul