Abstract
This paper discusses the proposal made by Yoshida Megumi 吉田惠 in 1954 that the word nai 奈 in the expression nail ho 奈何 is derived from a phonetic fusion of the words jo chih 若之 in the longer expression jo chih ho 若之何 that means the same thing. It is shown that this hypothesis makes sense in terms of the relative chronology of the two expressions in texts of the Chou period and that the phonetic difficulties are lessened if one accepts proposals that I have put forward elsewhere for Old Chinese reconstruction, though lack of an exact parallel for this particular fusion makes it difficult to come to a firm conclusion. Some related problems concerning other members of the word family of ju 如, jo 若, nai 奈, etc. are also dicussed.
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