Long time no see

[Paul Frank]

> Hendrickson ("Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins") claims it's from
> Chinese via pidgin English. Sounds believable to me.
>
> He gives the Chinese as "ch'ang chih mei", meaning the same thing. I am
> skeptical and I think there is an error here: maybe "ch'ang shih mei k'an"
> can fill the bill, but I'll defer to any Chinese-expert.
> -- Doug Wilson

You're right that ch'ang chih mei is wrong. As I said yesterday, long time
no see is perfect Chinese grammar. Ch'ang shih mei k'an (Wade-Giles is not
my favorite transliteration system, but never mind) is good grammatical
Chinese, but it's not idiomatic. In Chinese people say "hao jiu bu jian"
(good long or good while no see). I would not be surprised to learn that
Chinese coolies, as they used to be called, started saying "long time no
see." Who knows. Funny you should mention pidgin English.
All varieties of pidgin English are less inflected than standard English.

Paul
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Paul Frank
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