A tangent from here…
In Chinese, you can say “How are you?” as 你好嗎 ni hao ma, literally, “Are you good?” and in this form you are actually asking about how the person is.
If you just say 你好 ni hao that is just a greeting, not actually a question. The interesting part to me is that it drops the question particle, so you’re saying “You are good.” Which given the tendency to answer the phatic question in English with “Good” no matter how you’re really feeling, probably works well enough.