It is interesting that "Alohomora" comes from the Arabic word for "red" while "Albus" in Latin means "white" I.e. the specific stuff associated with the sign (colors, compass directions, etc) varied a lot regionally
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Having done some very brief looking into the extremely scattered dribs and drabs about Malagasy sikidy and European geomancy online -- which I find very confusing to the same degree as I do the hexagrams of the I Ching -- my sense is that it's very easy to oversimplify
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Like, the "Albus" or "Alohomora" sign is one that's associated with the direction of East and with the sunrise (hence "red" or "white") And associated with big crowds of people, big news, big exciting events
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Something associated with chaos and novelty, a shift of power Hence "favorable to thieves" being a colorful description, but not one relevant to most querents whose line of work isn't thievery (it's also "favorable to entrepreneurs" or "challengers in an election")
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Oh, fun fact, by the way, for people who enjoyed my analogy with the zodiac sign "Pisces" -- There actually is a Sidiky sign called Alohotsy, which is a Malagasy rendering of the Arabic word "al-Hout", "the whale", the name for the constellation Pisces
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Much like the stereotype for people who are born with Pisces as their sun sign is being "generous of spirit" and therefore highly emotional and empathetic, the standard reading of the Alohotsy sign is a time of "generosity of spirit" when debts are forgiven, hatchets buried, etc
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JKR apparently remembered "generosity of spirit" as "lightness of spirit" and decided to make "alihotsy" the name of an "African bush" whose leaves make you laughpic.twitter.com/YKRd54ewgr
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I hate that she keeps on taking shots at Steve Vander Ark for somehow being lazy because he didn't figure out how a Malagasy word for "the whale" could possibly end up being the name of a bush that makes you laugh Like he's the stupid one here
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Apparently it's an alternate name for the "hyena tree", because, again, JKR is thinking of entirely the wrong part of Africahttps://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Alihotsy
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Anyway it's pretty clear what happened here is that JKR jotted down some notes from this one page of this New Age book that had a list of the Sikidy signs because she thought they were really cool words and didn't bother to write down what country they came from
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And thought it would be fun to just, like, sprinkle them in here and there in random places Again -- plenty of writers do stuff like this, and I wouldn't think it was that big a deal if 1) it didn't come up in the context of her being all smug about how educated she was, and
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2) if she wasn't so FUCKING sloppy that she really thought she could get away with saying MADAGASCAR is in WEST AFRICA And acting like she's actually a language expert working off of the philological history of the words and not basically just free-associating
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Oh, I'm sure if a US politician ever casually referred to the districts of Chukotka and Kamchatka as "Western USA," it totally wouldn't cause an international incident. /s It is frustratingly common how little care many white people take with African geography in particular.
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