Isaac’s words of the week.

tother (pronoun or adjective).

The first word I was interested in sharing was “tother,” which presumably is an abbreviated form of “the other.” I came across this word rather long ago and found it quite interesting at the time. The word is also written “t’other” According to the Oxford English dictionary, tother is now chiefly used in Northern English-English and Scottish dialects of English. I especially thought that “tother” was an interesting word, as it is the definite equivalent of “another.” This sort of contrast, although does not exist in a single word form in standard English at present, would be a very innovative and potentially useful word. There is another word following this pattern, that is, the word “tone,” also written “t’one,” which means “the one.”

arborescence (adjective).

The second word that I want to share is arborescence, which means to have “tree-like growth or formation.” I stumbled upon this word while looking for words in the Oxford English Dictionary one day. The Oxford English Dictionary is rich with words coming from the same roots. I found myself looking at a string of words with the root “arbor.” I found the word curiously obscure and interesting. Other words with the root included arboreous, arboresce, and arboresque, all of which sound fun and unusual to me, and none of which were completely synonymous. Discovering such rare and unusual words in the OED for myself is always an interesting thing to do.

No can do (phrase).

This semester I met someone who is a visiting scholar from (Beijing) China who studies linguistics. He was interested in researching Chinese loanwords in English and passed out a questionnaire several weeks ago. This was all the impetus I needed to do an advanced search by language of origin in the Oxford English Dictionary. One interesting find for entries that were loanwords from Chinese was the phrase “no can do.” The phrase apparently came from a Chinese Pidgin English. In the etymology, the OED has written that the phrase may perhaps come from or at least is structurally similar to the Chinese phrase 不可以 (bù kěyǐ), literally translating to “not can”or “no can.” The expression came about in the Pidgin language, as people would say “can do” in place of “yes,” and the commonest negative form was this phrase, no can do.  It is interesting that this phrase, although seemingly not following the syntax of English, could become so commonplace. But, with the consideration that listemes are one unit and are memorized, the adoption into English makes more sense. The phrase is common in both spoken and written English, the second of which I tested with n-grams. The phrase is very comparable to the phrase “long time no see,” which has similar origins, coming from pidgin English as well. Interestingly, long time no see has an equivalent in Chinese, namely, 好久不見 (hǎo jiǔ bú jiàn, “so long(time) not see”) still today.