Friday, November 10, 2017

[tsvpafoh] Long time no see

Are there any actual languages which "long time no see" translated word by word results in a grammatical, preferably natural, sentence expressing the meaning "It has been a long time since we have last seen each other."?  Ideally we want a language which does not conjugate verbs and which can omit implied words.  Alternatively, a synthetic language which the 4 words each have enough modifiers to make it a grammatical sentence.

Mandarin Chinese apparently gets very close to the first case: 好久不見.  The four characters translate respectively to "it is good" "long" "no" "see".  The first two characters fuse to form a word or idiom meaning "long time".  I don't know whether it is a grammatical sentence and a natural way to express the meaning.

Also, "No can do."

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