Good morning all, how are you today? I wonder how formal or rather informal the greeting ‘Long time no speak’ might be? I mean if you use it as the opening line in an email, how would you come across?
Thank you and have a good Friday. (Good Friday is next week, isn’t?)
Nicole
Hi Nicole,
This is really a variation on the remark: Long time no see, which is frequently used as an opening gambit.
Alan
“Long time, no see” is a slightly comical expression that comes from the English spoken by Chinese immigrants, or else it comes from an English pidgin spoken in Chinese-speaking areas. Anyway, it was picked up from Chinese people somehow. “Long time, no speak” is a variation on this. You’ll never come off silly if you use these expressions, but I would never use them in a formal situation.
Another example would be “no tickie, no washie”, which means, “If you don’t pay me, I won’t work,” but it probably originally meant, “If you don’t have your claim ticket, you can’t pick up your laundry.”
We pick up a lot of strange expressions from foreigners’ English. Some of them are from funny-sounding translations, and they then enter the normal language. One of these is “the mother of all…,” which came from “the mother of all battles,” from a proclamation by Saddam Hussein. Some people still use the expression “running dog lackey” which came from a bad translation from communist China in the 1960s. And very often when Americans say, “I was only following orders,” they say it with a German accent. “Wild and crazy guy” came from some comedians who were imitating the English of Czechs and Slovaks.
Just a note: the “long time no see” phrase is ascribed by the “Online Etymology Dictionary” as originating from contact with Native Americans ca. 1900, not (apparently) with Chinese contact. Online Etymology Dictionary: etymonline.com/index.php?l=l&p=10
Cheers.
I don’t actually believe this explanation, because it’s based on literature, and the citation isn’t exactly the same expression. Plus, it’s documented after instances of the phrase in Chinese Pidgin English that appear in equally credible sources. Besides, I’ve never seen the “Native American” explanation actually point to the indigenous language that it is based on, or any sentence that it could have come from.
One the other hand, the case for this being a calque from both Mandarin and Cantonese within Chinese Pidgin English is pretty compelling. Plus, there are plenty of other phrases we get from Chinese pidgin, such as “look-see”, “no-go” and “where-to”.
Well, as we have all known and experienced, written sources are not always the final word. Note the “apparently.”
Cheers.