If we're just trying to translate the literal meaning of this sentence from English to Latin, these are good answers. But I suspect that if we went back to ancient Rome and found someone experiencing the meaning behind these words (a guy talking about a girl who has said goodbye too many time, and he doesn't believe that it's going to be final this time either), the actual phrase he says may be completely different. Because while English speakers (specifically, American English speakers, or even more specifically wherever the songwriter is from, looks like it's Los Angeles) reach for this particular phrase to convey this meaning, this is very idiomatic when you think about it.
The point you raise is one of the things most people -- professional translators, even -- get very, very wrong when translating (books, movie subtitles, game dialogue, you name it).
"How do you say 'phrase' in [target language]?" is more often than not a much worse approach than "What would a native speaker of [target language] say if they found themselves in the same situation?".
"What would a native speaker of [target language]
say if they found themselves in the same situation?".
It gets even trickier if you are translating fiction. If you are translating, say, Japanese anime/manga with a Japanese setting for an English-speaking audience you don't necessarily want the characters to sound like Americans or Brits or Canadians or what have you.
So you may have to use language that Americans understand, but still make them sound Japanese. Somehow.
What's funny about it though is as an English speaker who knows no Japanese but often enjoys reading subtitles, I'd much rather see the weird literal translation so I know "oh, this is some cool idiom in Japanese" rather than translating it to boring English idioms. Like I get much more out of the meaning when I see the raw original idiom literally translated, and I prefer that.
I think we take for granted that idioms from other cultures/languages are incomprehensible... often they make a lot of sense when literally translated even if they aren't a "thing" in the language to which they are being translated.
10 years ago there was a big fight/shift in the anime translator scene about exactly this. More literal translations with long translator notes were common back then, but eventually the less literal translation won as anime became more mainstream.
For anything remotely poetic (including song lyrics), I like to hear more literal translations, because the creative turns of phrase is is what makes them enjoyable.
Not only that but poetic things are more or less by definition things that a native speaker would not say routinely (otherwise they wouldn’t be poetic). Even when they are fairly colloquial (as here), there’s got to be some twist of rhythm or aptness of phrasing that is singular and memorable.
Given this fact, one of the most amazing things to me is when a song can be translated relatively faithfully and while preserving the rhyme structure. It just blows my mind to listen to a song in another language with English subtitles and have it line up close enough to the English and still rhyming in their seperate tongue.
There are several translations of Harry Potter books to Russian language. Some translations keep names a is - Longbottom or Ravenclaw. While others translate them to Russian. There is (or rather was) so much love and hate about both options.
> the actual phrase he says may be completely different
That's also true in English, in my experience. I've never heard someone express this phrase (or a variation) in conversation, but the sentiment is common.
A typical phrasing in English would be more like "She always says she's done but she always comes back."
Ha, I've never really listened in to the rest of the words and kinda assumed the meaning was "she left many people" with "too many" indicating loneliness. TIL
Given that this is meant to be poetic it is likely that a Roman would have said it in Greek, which was considered a more "cultured" language than mere boorish Latin.
Fun facts, Grammar schools in the UK were originally schools created mainly to teach Latin grammar and currently there are 163 Grammar schools operating in the UK as academic oriented (or orientated per UK English grammar), secondary schools [1],[2]. You know that the language is hard when you have multitude of schools dedicated to teach its grammar. Latin has a reputation of a complex language with complicated grammar, and the OP kind of demonstrating this perception.
Interestingly, based on School Standards and Framework Act 1998, no new maintained grammar schools can be opened [3].
Latin grammar is literally trivial, because it was a part of the trivium in traditional liberal arts education.
You did not study the grammar in order to use the language but to understand the structure of it. You also studied logic to understand the structure of ideas and arguments, and rhetoric to communicate them. Then you proceeded to the quadrivium to study arithmetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy.
It was, but that has nothing to do with name "grammar school". In the liberal arts tradition that goes back to the ancient Greece, you studied grammar, logic, and rhetoric to learn to think and argue properly. Those were considered prerequisites to learning anything real. Grammar was considered the most fundamental of the three, which is why it was taught in the lowest-level schools.
I think you can achieve the same "compression" in other latin languages. In portuguese, you may be able to translate this as "despedira-se demais" or "despediu-se demais" (despediu-se = she said goodbye, despedira-se = pluperfect form of she said goodbye, demais = too many times).
Slavic too. In Polish: żegnała (she said goodbye) za często (literally too often, but used here it would convey the meaning and sound more natural than literal za wiele razy).
BTW żegnała encodes the gender. If it was he it would be żegnał. So arguably it's more compressed than latin.
BTW2 the real compression happens in conditionals żegnałaby = she would have said goodbye
Yup Polish has A LOT of loanwords. Most people don't realize how many. My favorite example is how Polish stole Latin, German and Czech words for color and now each mean different things :)
Kolor - color
Farba - paint
Barwa - hue
Also Polish is surprisingly similar to Sanskrit, for example only recently I realized that budzik (alarm clock) pobudka (waking up someone as a noun) and all related bud- words have the same word root as Buddha (the awaken one). Blew my mind :)
My favorites: adidasy (for generic gym shoes) and electrolux (for vacuum cleaner).
I'm not sure if those are still in generic use but when I lived there long ago these were Western brands that you simply could not buy in Poland and so the brand names became stand-ins for the objects themselves.
Yes, I think similarly in Spanish would be `se despidió demasiado` or `se despidió demasiadas veces` if you want `too many times` rather than `too much`. Disclaimer: Spanish is not my first language.
Does demais in portuguese mean too much, or too many times?
"muitas" is "many", "demasiadas" would be "too many". "demasiadas" works better in the context here, but I (Brazillian) don't think I've ever heard it spoken, only read.
I'm really curious, where is the gendered information in "valedixit"? I feel like the proposed translation misses that romantic weight by keeping the gender ambiguous. What am I missing?
I don't speak Latin, but according to my short research (aka googling), it does not distinguish between third-person masculine and feminine. So the ambiguity is also present in Latin.
The thing missing is the context in which the sentence is used.
From the comments on stackexchange: "if the context refers to this person enough to make it clear who "she" is, it should also make it clear who "he/she/it/they" is."
For some reason, it's fine to lose most of the meaning when translating to Portuguese or Latin for simplification - but it's not okay to just simplify in English.
That's not true. What you provided completely changes the meaning, whereas the translation I provided only loses one detail (the speaker's genre) without altering the meaning.
One thing you should consider is that, in English, you cannot omit the "she" pronoun without making the sentence incorrect or unclear, since modern English does not have declensions for the grammatical person. But in other languages it is not only correct, but speakers do drop the pronouns when they speak. This is what the commenter was referring to when they said "That translation strikes me as overly literal, trying to keep a match for each English word. I'd go more idiomatic with this.".
I agree that the translation I provided is not 100% word-for-word perfect, since it drops a detail while trying to maintain the original message and compress it as much as possible, but saying that it lost most of its meaning is very unfair.
The ability to express thoughts more concisely in various languages is kind of sort of a plot point in the science fiction novel Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany, published in 1966. Picked up a few of his novels to read and I've been enjoying them.
I'm really sad at how much Latin I've managed to lose since my school days. It's really an incredible language and this stack exchange post shows some of that versatility.
Because the words in Latin contain dense grammatical information in their spelling, you can be much more flexible with word order.
This gives classical poets the ability to do crazy things with word ordering to create "word pictures" where the structuring ordering of the words conveys some additional meaning. This can be done in English too, but classical Latin is almost made for it.
For example, Catulus 85:
"Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris.
Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior."
The translation Wikipedia gives is:
"I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.
I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured."
But there is so much brilliance in the structure of the poem that translation cannot really encapsulate. The last word "excrucior" (I am crucified) references a relationship between the structure of the first and second line. Each verb on the first line has a "mate" on the second. For example: odi (I hate)<->excrucior (I am tortured), requires (you ask) <-> nescio (I know). If you draw lines connecting these mates to each other, they form a number of crosses - referencing the "crux" in "excrucior". The poem literally depicts the torture instrument that is Catulus' love.
Even more remarkably, this poem follows a strict metrical standard dictating the order of long and short syllables: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegiac_couplet and it achieves this meter in part due to the use of elision in the opening of the poem, where two vowel sounds get merged due to the ordering of words. "Odi et Amo" is read as "Odet Amo" as the the love and hate crush together and evoke that sense of pressure and torment that underlies the couplet.
Classical Latin had so much capacity for structural complexity that is really remarkable. It's not just that you can say more stuff with less words, but that the allocation of information in the grammar allows for entirely different expressions than you could make if word order dictated meaning.
Great comment! For anyone looking to learn a bit more about this, the "crossing" technique described above is called "chiasmus": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus
Another famous example is "Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus" from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this poem, in fact).
And, of course, speaking of Lesbia (traditionally identified as Clodia Metelli, otherwise known as Quadrantaria), one should mention her “sparrow” mentioned in Catullus 2: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/natural-histories/catul.... Reading that article again I saw a tidbit I missed before: “As Richard Hooper has recently pointed out, ‘in Egyptian hieroglyphics the determinative for “little, evil, bad” was … śerau, the sparrow’”. And so it is: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sparrow_(hiero....
Not parent but yes; related meanings (e.g. hate/torture, ask/know) and typically same part of speech (e.g. both verbs or both adjectives), and the lines having similar (but here reversed) sentence structure (another commenter posted the wiki link to Chiasmus which goes into more detail.
The structure we see here is
x0 and y0, ...z0 /
z1... y1 and x1.
Exactly this! It gets even cooler in this example too because the meter for "Odi et amo" elided to "Od'et amo" directly parallels the scansion for "excrucior" (long syllable, short syllable, short syllable, long syllable). So the two concepts that start and end the poem (love+hate, and torture) are also linked by how they are pronounced. Incidentally, that linkage is also the message of the poem itself.
These two lines are basically just Catulus' being a complete show-off. And IMO, some of Ovid's work makes Catulus look like a bit of an amateur by comparison.
Classical latin poetry is like 10% being able to write down clever ideas and 90% showing off your grasp of grammar and vocabulary such that you can pose and solve incredibly difficult linguistic puzzles. I think Sanskrit is pretty similar in this respect too.
Completely agree. Catulus was sort of a talented incel-type imho. I remember his work being way more fun to read and translate but Ovid was obviously more brilliant and...poetic.
The more elaborate books of the Bible, like Isaiah/Yeshayahu and Psalms/Tehillim, make use of this kind of structure a lot in the original. You can easily find "triple chiasms" with structure ABCCBA. I don't know why this isn't emphasised usually.
Catullus of course is one of the masters. There is also the "da mi basia mille deinde centum..." that has the structure of an abacus
I'm curious about why you've added what I assume are stress marks in the Latin. I studied it (admittedly, a while back) all my way through school and have never once seen this used, including in this poem. In no way a criticism of me trying to make a thing about it - is it an American thing?
Honestly they were just there in the Wikipedia text I copied. I've seen them in more modern texts to help with pronunciations and translation (if I recall correctly some words have different meanings depending on the length of the final vowel but that can normally be determined from context). Romans sometimes used the apex to denote long vowels which would have otherwise been ambiguous but I think it wasn't as commonplace as in textbooks today.
They’re length markers. There’s also the rarely used ˘ to show that a vowel be read short instead of long.
At least in my gymnasium in Switzerland we had the length markers for all the words, from the very beginning, and in all texts we read and all grammar forms we learned.
No, not in inscriptions! (Even though inscriptions did in fact use length markers, there’s the superlong I for example.) When we transcribe actual Latin text we make some changes.
The actual inscriptions use heavy abbreviations, which we resolve in our text. And then we also disambiguate V into v and u. And as a bonus we often add the length markers.
6 years of Latin in school (only two years ago), at least officially a Latinum (German proof of knowing Latin) - and I don't understand a single sentence. Granted, I never had to learn understanding spoken language, but still.. Maybe it's time to reactivate what's left of my knowledge
Latin has a great introductory textbook called Lingua Latina per se illustrata by Hans Ørberg. I only got through the first book, so I'm no expert, but this is the one everybody recommends. And it's really neat: there is no English in the book at all, it's all Latin from page one, building up from really simple words and grammar in a logical way.
I wonder if the original question -asking if a popular song lyric could be translated into Latin - was asked because someone wants a tattoo of it.
I know a Latin teacher and she gets several emails a year from strangers asking her to translate phrases into Latin because they want them in a tattoo.
> James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher
If you take the first clause:
> James, while John had had "had"
You could replace it with:
> James, while John had "had"
Similarly, most of the (non-quoted) instances of "had had" could be replaced with "had", keeping the meaning almost exactly the same. (edit: this is the point of the sentence. "had had" and "had" are almost equivalent, but the teacher happens to prefer "had had".) This is like the original, where "had said" can be contracted to "said" without loss of meaning, so
I always heard it as "She's said goodbye too many times before," but that was probably my mind filling in the gap. Also, I never heard the rest of the lyrics so I don't know if they're present or past tense.
If you're interested in the grammar, I think the distinction you're getting at is pluperfect (plan action that was completed-in-the-past-in-the-past) and perfect (an action that was completed-in-the-past).
"She had said goodbye too many times before" means, at some point in the past, it was the case that she had previously said goodbye too many times. I think this is the intended meaning.
"She said goodbye too many times before" I don't think makes sense if you're extremely literal about it, since I can't see what "before" would track to without the embedded past.
The grammatically correct versions I can come up with are:
- She had (or she'd) said goodbye too many times before.
- She said goodbye too many times.
- She said, "Goodbye too many times before".
Disclaimer: I do get that these are all worse song lyrics and that nobody had any problem understanding the intended meaning of the example sentence, which is sort of the goal of grammar.
> "She said goodbye too many times before" I don't think makes sense if you're extremely literal about it, since I can't see what "before" would track to without the embedded past.
It would grammatically work if you interpreted 'said' as a habitual action.
"Before [the etiquette training], she said 'goodbye' too many times. [Now, she says it just once.]"
In the context of the song, I think the habitual interpretation makes sense; the lyrics speak of trying to break the pattern of a dysfunctional relationship. This also works in that "said goodbye" has figurative intent (meaning 'left the relationship') over its literal meaning of verbally expressing one's departure.
Somehow the context of the song hasn't been shared on the thread yet:
Whispered goodbye as she got on a plane
Never to return again
...
This love has taken its toll on me
She said goodbye too many times before
And her heart is breaking in front of me
And I have no choice 'cause I won't say goodbye anymore
Clearly "before" is needed to rhyme with "anymore". Also it is referencing the times she said "goodbye" before she said it this last time when she got on the plane.
There's no audible difference between signing "she's said" and "she said", the s's blend together. Any possible difference would be entirely obscured by stylistic choices.
Even vocalizing normally the difference is hard to tell. Try saying "She said I love you" vs "She's said I love you" – unless you make a point to completely stop in between words there's basically zero distinction.
Yes, probably (I don't know the context), but it seems to me that in colloquial US English the traditional complex tense system has been somewhat simplified: perhaps another example of the historical influence of Germans and other non-native speakers in the US. I'm British, of course, so I don't really know what I'm talking about here but I think I've heard native speakers of US English say things that are just wrong, because of the choice of verb tense, in any form of British English that I am familiar with: things like "Did you already do it?", though I can't guarantee that's a good example. Of course it could be that the verb system of colloquial US English is just as complex as the verb system of British English but the subtleties pass me by: I just notice the things that to me seem wrong, like failing to distinguish between "Did you do" and "Have you done".
It's pretty common to use present tenses in US English for events in the future or past. E.g. "I'm at the store the other day, and this guy comes up to me...", "I'm visiting the store later"
Perfect tense is common. Future is occasionally avoided like above. Pluperfect and future perfect are almost never used, and most speakers would convey that meaning a different way. E.g. "I'll visit the store before then" rather than "I'll have visited the store". There is also some pseudo future tenses related to "going/gonna" (e.g. "I'm going to do that").
I think tenses are probably taught in some schools, but I didn't learn any of this until I took other languages. The average US English speaker probably doesn't know the names of all the tenses and doesn't even know what subjunctive, indicative, etc. mean.
Yep, for example, it's standard for US speakers to say "I wish you would have done X instead" whereas Brits would say that should be "I wish you had done X instead". I believe that that construction is a past subjunctive (since it's counterfactual) and therefore that the Brits are essentially right here ("had" is a past subjunctive form but "would have" is not; it's a conditional).
This is not standard or correct in American English either, though interestingly, German uses the same form for both situations ("ich wünsche, du hättest es getan" vs "du hättest es getan, wenn..."), so if that construction is more common in American English it's possible that it's due in part to the influence of German speakers.
That's interesting. While perhaps not "standard", I'd definitely say it is very common among educated US speakers. Not to blame Bruce Springsteen -- who for all I know might have been trying to depict via grammatical error a certain sort of person in his song -- but for me it always brings to mind the song Bobby Jean. But now I see that apparently that is "wished" not "wish" so it's extra confusing :)
Me and you, we've known each other
Yeah, ever since we were sixteen
I wished I would have known
I wished I could have called you
Just to say "Goodbye, Bobby Jean"
> Yep, for example, it's standard for US speakers to say "I wish you would have done X instead" whereas Brits would say that should be "I wish you had done X instead".
Maybe that is something some Americans might say, but it is certainly not the most natural way I would say it.
I would likely say "I wish you'd done X instead" or "I wish you'd X'd"
The answerer does say that either the perfect past (Latin’s closest to -ed) or the pluperfect past (Latin’s closest to had -ed) would work, they just chose perfect past. Maybe that choice was because the perfect past has a sense of finality that English’s simple past doesn’t, so it isn’t necessary to reach deeper into the sequence of tenses as it is in English.
Since several people are not sure about this, I figured an easily skipped little grammar point can't hurt too much.
Passive past would be something like "Goodbye had been said too many times before [by her]"
In active voice, the subject does something to the object.
In passive voice, the object is affected [by the subject]. (I wanted to write "is done something to" instead of "affected", but that feels ugly - the issue with affected is that it is also an adjective; I really mean the past participle here)
The object becomes the subject, and vice versa. The be auxiliary needs to be present. If be is not here, it ain't passive. If be is here… be can be used in active voice so you can't know for sure, but if there's a "by ..." clause, or if adding one feels natural, that a good hint.
The intent of the passive voice is usually to focus on the object or the action, of de-emphasis the subject, of even to drop it because it's not important, it's redundant or even to create some suspense regarding who performed the action.
(English is a second language to me, though what I wrote completely applies to my first language too)
No, that's past perfect but not passive. Passive voice is where the subject is not the actor. "Mistakes were made" is a classic example. Mistakes are the subject but did not do the verb. Someone made mistakes.
I always heard the lyric as ‘she’s said goodbye..’, which both scans and makes more grammatical sense. Also matches the tense of the previous line - ‘this love has taken its toll..’
Mostly unrelated, but there was a study [0] some time ago which said that the information rate of all languages was roughly the same. So if a language had more data conveyed per syllable, then it might be spoken slower for instance.
Spanish (Spain) is often spoken faster than English. And in my experience if you translate something from English to Spanish the text becomes 20%–30% longer.
The weird one is that Latin American Spanish is spoken much slower, but with the same information per syllable (presumably). I always wondered if the information rate would actually be the same for Spanish (LATAM) and Spanish (Spain) - my suspicion is that it's lower in LATAM. Perhaps pauses and connective words could account for the difference though?
> always wondered if the information rate would actually be the same
As a general rule of thumb, human spoken languages all communicate about 5 bytes per second of info. The limit seems to be not because of auditory processing or verbal issues, but rather how fast someone can process thoughts.
I don't know about latam vs Spain specifically, that would be interesting. Seems unlikely that it would be more varied than e.g. English, Italian, and Japanese, which all tend towards the same ~5Bps limit.
There's definitely differences between countries and regions, and I don't have data for it, but the stereotype of Latin American Spanish being slower than Spain has by and large been true in my experience.
Do you think on average Latin American Spanish is spoken at the same speed as Spain?
Edit: And regardless of regional variations I am certain that there are Latin American regions which have a generally slower speed of speech than regions in Spain. So the thing that interests me is whether in that case the Spain Spanish has more pauses etc.
Not only that, but a lot of features of various forms of Latin American Spanish also occur in Spain, especially southern Spain which is the "root" of much of it.
Now "totiēns valedīxit" is quite a bit shorter than the English original.
I was hoping our friends on StackExchange could have found a Latin equivalent that fits the number of syllables of the English version, or it won't help if the original translation request was motivated by an upcoming Latin karaoke... not that machine translation was any better.
Dixit Google Translatum:
Tam altus eram, non agnovi
Ignis ardens in oculis eius
Chaos gubernans mentem meam
Vale quod illa surrexit in planum susurrabant
Numquam iterum redi, sed semper in corde meo, heu
Hic amor accepit portorium in me
Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
Et cor eius breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
Et non optio
'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
Whoa?
Whoa?
Whoa?
Conatus sum optimum appetitum pascere
Serva eam omni nocte venire
Tam difficile est ut ei satisfiat, oh
Tenentur ludens amore sicut erat sicut ludus
Simulans idem
Deinde conversus et iterum discede, sed uh-oh
Hic amor accepit portorium in me
Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
Et cor eius breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
Et non optio
'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
Whoa?
Whoa?
Whoa?
Fracta haec figam, alis fractis reparabo tuis
Et fac omnia recte (saxum est, ita bene)
Premuntur coxis tuis, ego digitos deprimo
Omnis inch ex vobis
Quia scio quod vis ut faciam
Hic amor accepit portorium in me
Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
Her breakin cor 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
Et non optio
'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
Hic amor accepit portorium in me
Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
Et cor meum est breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
Et illa etiam pluries ante vale dixit
Hic amor accepit portorium in me
Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
Et cor eius breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
Et non optio
'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
EDIT: this automatic translation has so many errors, my late Latin teacher must just have turned in his grave.
You might want the vocative of "world" (MUNDE) and the singular imperative of "go" (I). The latter is a bit easy to confuse with the Roman numeral for the number one, though!
Eh... this is a really idiomatic expression in English. Maybe if you rummage Plautus or Terrence, perhaps even the epistolary corpus of Pliny or Cicero, you could chance upon something sentimentally accurate, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Grammatically accurate word for word reconstructions aren't really going to convey it.
english
10 - She said goodbye too many times before
latin
6 - nimium valedīxit
polish
7 - Zbyt często się żegnała
german
10 - Sie hat sich schon zu oft verabschiedet
french
11 - Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent avant
italian
12 - Ha detto addio troppe volte prima
portuguese
11 - despedira-se demasiadamente (user tail_exchange)
14 - Ela despediu-se demasiadas vezes antes (deepl)
nb: the target sentence has 'before', which is lacking in some submissions.
There is surely multiple alternatives for any given language, similar to Draconis compressing the latin form, in french instead of the literal:
11 - Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent avant
You could replace:
* "dire au revoir" by "saluer" (which used both for greeting and farewell so you get a bit of data information lost)
* "trop souvent" which uses the "trop" adverbe when there is a word for it: "excessivement"
Which got me:
11 - Elle salua excessivement avant
Still as many syllable (4) but less words (from 8 to 4) which might be easier to read.
That would not mean anything to a French speaker I'm afraid. "Saluer" is seldom used. It tends to mean "saying hello" or saluting someone in passing, more than "saying goodbye".
Elle a dit au revoir tellement souvent would work.
Better: Elle a dit adieu tellement souvent. Not the exact same meaning, but confers an undertone of dishonesty, as "adieu" should typically be said only once (it means you don't expect to see the other person ever again, except maybe in some afterlife).
Even better IMHO: Elle dit adieu si souvent. Present instead of past. A little farther from the original, but shorter and with a little more punch. It now implies it's something she does all the time.
In the version from Google Translate, "trop souvent" adds a notion of frequency like "too often" would, "avant" is shoehorned as a misplaced compulsory match for "before" when "too many times before" already felt like a ready-made phrase at this point.
In yours, "salua" would likely pass as a greeting, while "excessivement" would rather refer to the silly moves she made. Definitely harder to read for me.
I agree the "before" is the hard part to get right, I process "too many times before" as "too many times already", emphasis on reaching that number of times, given the song's context. Maybe we should treat "said […] before" as a smoothest form of "had said […]" to sing.
I'd go for "Elle a tant de fois dit au revoir" (9 syllabes).
Adieu is probably better in that context too: shorter, since we're golfing, and more to the point (definitive goodbye).
You could also insert déjà, which conveys the notion of before: Elle a déjà tant dit adieu. Well, this means so many times and not too many times, so you could say: Elle a déjà trop dit adieu (8). This could also be directly translated as she's already said goodbye too much. You can drop already/déjà, but lowers drops the emphasis on before. If you do so, Elle disait tant adieu (6) works.
That doesn't really have the same meaning, and sounds very awkward though, especially because "saluer" needs an object.
I'd say (considering the context, the meaning is that she "told me goodbye" too many times before): Elle m'a trop dit au revoir.
That's 6 syllables (7 if you pronounce the schwa) and I think that's close enough to what Maroon 5 mean in their song.
Elle m'a trop quitté could work as well, with 5 syllables. I don't think you can get shorter than that, each word here seems necessary and as small as can be, to me.
If you can spare a few syllables, "déjà trop" or "trop souvent" would make these sentences much more natural.
I would go for this one. child comments suggest "tant", but this means "so many times" and not "too many times" (another way to say it would be "si souvent").
Adding "avant" sounds very wrong, but maybe it does in English too, I don't know.
You could use "par le passé": "Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent par le passé". This sounds more natural to me.
> Elle salua excessivement avant
Nice gulf :-) Now, the passé simple ("simple past") tense does not sound right for two reasons:
- It's never used when speaking, only in writing, and even then, only if you want to write a novel or something.
- This tense also refer to a one-off event. Like, one day at a particular time she said goodbye too many times in a row, or something. I would not assume a one-off event here.
However, English will usually come out at or near the top in terms of "syllable efficiency" due to its high incidence of common monosyllabic words, and the feature that inflectional suffixes will often not add a syllable (e.g. dog-s, love-d).
If you cheat a little, you can get to similarly low numbers in German:
"Zuviele Abschiede von ihr" - 8
"Ihre zuvielen Abschiede" - 8
"[Sie] verabschiedete sich zu oft" - 8-9
If you accept "trennen" ("separate") for "saying goodbye", you can do
"[Sie] trennte sich zu oft" - 5-6
If you accept "[weg]gehen" (go [away]) for "saying goodbye", you can also do
"[Sie] ging zu oft [weg]" - 3-5
The "Sie" (she) is optional, but leaving it out sounds hurried and informal.
The literal translation also isn't very idiomatic imho, I'd rather expect to hear one of the latter ones if it was really about separations and going away, the former phrasing suggests more something of literally saying too many greetings.
More like "Sie verabschiedete sich zu viele Male zuvor" (literally, "she farewelled too many times before", but acceptable to a native speaker).
And no, you can't omit "sie", German is not a Romantic language and the pronoun is required even if the verb has to match it by case anyway.
I'd say your examples are more than "a little" cheating. Most of these are incomprehensible or completely fail to deliver the same idea as the original. You can truncate sentences in poetry but at some point you just end up with disjointed fragments.
I don’t think it’s meaningful to compare syllables, since not all languages take the same amount of time to say a given number of syllables. English for example is an stress-timed language, not a syllable-timed one, so the number of unstressed syllables is basically irrelevant.
It doesn't. "Despidió" is already past tense. That said, "despidiose", while valid, is quite archaic. If it was me, I'd say "se despidió demasiado" or even "se despidió de más"
Edit: Reading the meaning of the song, I'd say "dijo adios demasiadas veces", as it stays closer to the original meaning.
you can remove the `prima` from the italian version: it's implied by the use of past tense and it sounds really bad in italian.
if you want to emphasize the `before`, you can use: `ha già detto addio troppe volte` instead
Although it's possible to drop "się" if we don't care about the response to the woman, so i.e. she could write a letter with goodbyes, not caring/not receiving the response back:
that's more like "she's been saying goodbye too often"
the "before" at the end throws me off. I don't think there's an correct tense to properly get this across in Polish. "Kiedyś żegnała się zbyt często"? "Często" also kinda applies to frequency in time, not count, so a literal "zbyt wiele razy" feels better.
I feel like "she'd been saying goodbye too often" is "zbyt często żegnała", but adding "zbyt często już żegnała" is like "she'd been saying goodbye too often, but now she's fed up with saying goodbyes, and doesn't do that anymore".
Of course "Kiedyś żegnała się zbyt często" is more explicit and understandable, but not as efficient for this competition :)
It doesn't really capture the intent of the original sentence either. To convey the same idea you'd have to say something like "Za wiele razy mówiła żegnam"
"Say goodbye" doesn't necessarily mean "to speak the words 'goodbye'". I'm not an English expert, but I think that waving with your hand is also "saying goodbye". And if that's true, then "żegnać" is the same as "saying goodbye".
I mean technically I would translate "nimium valedīxit" into "elle faisait trop d'adieux", which is also 6 syllables (with the advantage to keep the she). If you want to keep before, which is skipped in this latin transaction, then it would be 2 extra syllables.
If we open it up to Arabic slang then we can almost compress to 1, right?
رَحلِتَك
Because we can use the form of the verb that both disparagingly implies "sends you away", in the imperative form to imply what's actually being requested (obedience of repetition). Of course, it's not perfect, but definitely easily doable with 2.
The English starting point is very questionable. Is it trying to say "she had said goodbye too many times before"? In any case, this makes the exercise of translating questionable.
Both “she said goodbye too many times before” and “she had said goodbye too many times before” are grammatically correct English. They have slightly different meanings.
Agreed; "she said goodbye too many times before" is grammatical. But it's temporally ambiguous. The sentence is reporting on a time in the past, a time when "her" utterances were even further in the past.
I suggested rephrasing prior to translation, to clarify the tense of "said".
As someone upthread noted, it's a song, so prosody is more important than grammar. But I think it's still an ugly construction.
[Edit] I'm not sure what tense it is; I'm a native English speaker, and I don't think I was ever taught the grammar of my own language. I don't think it's past-perfect/pluperfect; that would be "she has said" (she has finished saying it). Wikipedia disagrees, but doesn't say what tense "she has said" is.
That would be the past perfect tense, a different tense with a different meaning that is only used in the context of another past event you're talking about. The original quote is simple past tense and is correct.
You could also use the present perfect, "she has said goodbye too many times before", which sounds slightly better to me, but is again a different tense and implies the goodbye-saying is an ongoing phenomenon. If it's all in the past, this tense would be wrong.
Not surprised. These models are inherently stochastic and will therefore happily say A and ¬A when prompted multiple times. A fundamental difference to how humans operate. (You could say that humans are stochastic, too, but they're stochastic in different ways.)
People wondering why this is on Hacker News - probably the fascinating part is how a relatively complex 7 word phrase in English translates idiomatically into a 2 word phrase in Latin.
There is a word used frequently in the Hebrew Bible that is four letters long ויהי that is typically translated into English using 5 words or 19 letters “and it came to pass”. See, for example, the beginning of Genesis 4:3.
This makes me wonder, what is the largest difference between letter count in two different languages?
This example has a 4:19 ratio. Depending on what translation you go with (I think the consensus is actually the three word answer “nimium saepe valedixit”), the Latin example has a 22:38 (11:19) ratio.
Of course, this is just considering alphabetic languages. If we look at SE Asian languages we will find more extreme examples. For instance, a google search led me to:
“If we're going the other way, it could be "伥", which Pleco gives as
the ghost of a man who fell a victim to a tiger, yet helps the tiger to devour others”
Letter count is meaningless. You can change it by just changing the way you spell things, which was already arbitrary. (For example, there is a very real question of whether that final m in nimium is pronounced at all.)
Nimium saepe valedixit is 9 syllables and, as frequently noted on the page, does not attempt to translate the entire English source text, which is 10 syllables. It was kind of surreal reading the answers, since none of them attempt to determine what the English lyric means, and it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence. You need to determine what it means before you try to translate it into another language.
I just listened to the song (well, the first three verses, which is all of the verses) while looking at a printout of the lyrics, and I can't determine what that line in the chorus is supposed to mean. It's very strange grammar:
This love has taken its toll on me
She said goodbye too many times before
Her heart is breaking in front of me
And I have no choice
'Cause I won't say goodbye anymore
The line in question, She said goodbye too many times before, stands out like a sore thumb for being preceded and followed by sentences that, unlike it, are both in the present tense. There is no indication anywhere in the song, as far as I can see, of what "before" refers to.
So my instinct is to essentially write off the possibility of translating the lyric with the aphorism "garbage in, garbage out".
> it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence
Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it?
> The line in question, She said goodbye too many times before, stands out like a sore thumb for being preceded and followed by sentences that, unlike it, are both in the present tense.
But it's a song. Prosody can't be held to the same strict rules of tense consistency (or other grammatical rules) as prose. And flipping tenses between lines is hardly an uncommon feature of songwriting. Take, for example, Leonard Cohen's "Boogie Street":
It is indeed quite common for poetry to violate the normal rules of the language. But that takes one of two forms: archaism, or a flaw in the poetry. (It's also common for poetry to violate the rules that govern the poetry itself. Composing poetry is very difficult!) Compare the opening of Mark Chesnutt's She Was:
She started her new life
Ten dollars in debt
That's all it took to get started back then
A trip to the courthouse across the state line
No one could stop her
She'd made up her mind
He was eighteen
And she wasn't
But she said she was / and never thought twice
And came back home as my daddy's wife
She just shook her head
When her mama said "Are you sure he's the one?"
But she was
Here we see some fairly complex temporal structure handled fluently, with no problems of any kind. The writing is better.
>> it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence
> Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it?
The use of the simple past tense is not compatible with the sense of before that everyone here is trying to assign.
I don't think it's that complex. The implication seems to be that they have broken up/argued so many times before, and this time they're breaking up for good
And the first line is past tense, just like the second.
Edit: Reading all of the lyrics they were sleeping together, she fell in love with him so he broke it off
> And the first line is past tense, just like the second.
This is a somewhat complex issue, so please bear with me.
First, we can dispense with the idea that the tense of the first line is "just like the second". They are different and the difference is quite significant.
Whether the first line should be called "past tense" or "present tense" is more of a fussy terminological issue. There are two concepts in linguistics which have to do with how the verb relates to a timeline:
- "Tense" has to do with whether the action takes place before, during, or after whatever time would be referred to by the word "now".
- "Aspect" has to do with the temporal structure of the action itself, rather than its position relative to a "camera" placed at "now": maybe the action occurs at an indivisible point in time ("That's when I noticed the rabbit"); maybe it takes place continuously over an extended duration ("I've been reading for thirty minutes"); maybe it occurs at a large number of separate points within a continuous window ("I used to visit the donut shop every day after school")
Except I used the wrong words just now. "Tense" and "aspect" are terms from syntax, and you can determine them purely by looking at the form of the verb. The definitions I gave belong to semantics: when I said "tense", I should have said "time", and I'm not sure what the semantics-specific term for the quality related to aspect is. Anyway, we name the verb forms, "tense" and "aspect", according to whether they primarily correspond with those semantic definitions.
Except, again, there's a little more to it. We'd like to name the verb forms according to this distinction, but there is a long tradition in Latin scholarship of referring to both of those distinctions by the same name, "tense", and this bled over into English.
So we can say the following about line 1 and line 2:
- Line 1 is, semantically, focused on the present. It is making a claim about "now".
- The verb is conjugated in what would traditionally be called the "perfect tense"; according to the tense/aspect distinction described above, it is present tense (reflected in the form of have), indicating that we are talking about "now", and perfect aspect (reflected in the fact that have is used at all), indicating that the action described ("taking a toll") is already finished.
- Line 2 is semantically focused on the past. It is making a claim about some time before "now".
- The verb in line 2 is conjugated in what would traditionally be called the "simple past" or "preterite" tense. The aspect is not clear, because the English preterite tense is used for multiple different verbal semantic aspects.
The fact that line 2 is talking about the past when the rest of the chorus is talking about the present is very strange.
> There is no indication anywhere in the song, as far as I can see, of what "before" refers to.
Is English your native language? I’m asking because it is my native language and the entire phrase, including “before”, is clear to me.
“Before” is a temporal indicator. You could replace it with another temporal indicator and the phrase would still make sense, For example, “She said goodbye too many times today”. You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.
Yes, English is my native language. USA, California and New Mexico. For what it's worth, I qualified for SET by scoring 710 on the SAT verbal section at age 12.
> I’m asking because it is my native language and the entire phrase, including “before”, is clear to me.
It is a common phenomenon for people to claim that sentences are perfectly clear to them when, objectively, those sentences do not have a meaning at all. On Language Log they occasionally discuss "Escher sentences", with the prototype example being "More people have been to France than I have".
> “Before” is a temporal indicator. You could replace it with another temporal indicator and the phrase would still make sense, For example, “She said goodbye too many times today”. You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.
Except I can see what's happening with "She said goodbye too many times today." That sentence will be followed up with some explanation of the consequences of having said goodbye too many times.
In the chorus, the intent might have been that the line "she said goodbye too many times before" is an explanation of the preceding line (that's how people are interpreting it here). Or the line might just have been thrown in with no rhyme or reason, completely disconnected from the rest of the song. But regardless of the intent, the line has failed to connect to the sentence before it or the sentence after it, which means that we cannot determine what it's trying to say.
> You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.
Moving back to this, it's necessary to ask what exactly "before" is referring to because the question came up of whether and how it should be represented in the Latin translation. It might conceivably refer to "before now" (in which case the suggestion of Latin perfect tense is fine), "before some point identified by the context" (you'd want pluperfect, if the point was in the past, or future perfect if the point was in the future [or of course perfect if the point is "now"]), or "before some specific event" (you'd want the preposition ante, and you'd also need to mention the event).
You are reading way too much into this. It’s just a pop song. This isn’t high literature. “Before now” makes the most sense to me, but, like poetry, you interpret it however you want. There is no right answer.
She said goodbye too many times before doesn't seem confusing to me.
He's lamenting a romance that's been difficult for him. Before now, during the difficult relationship, she said goodbye or left him too many times, causing the difficulty and toll it has taken on him.
I am not a native speaker, but doesn't "before" just mean "in the past" here? It sounds clear to me: the girl has previously tried to break up many times, so now he is breaking up with her.
I don’t think so. The first letter means “and” and the rest is the verb “to be”. In this case, the verb is in the Qal Sequential imperfect 3rd Person Masculine Singular form. Thus doesn’t have the same connotation.
Oh yes! It touches language and compression, both dear subjects to programmers.
If the accepted answer stands, that's remarkable. I wonder how one could measure a language efficiency. Maybe syllable count ? But one would need a sort of assembly to translate to and verify that a sentence computes the intended information.
If you translate it back into English, “she had said goodbye too much”, it’s clear that the real question is, “did the author mean something by those choices which the translation obliterated?”
Translation is a process which both erases information and introduces new information. Any comparison of languages which tries to evaluate which languages are more compact has to work with some assumptions about what information should be conveyed. A statistical distribution of language-independent messages. But when you choose a distribution, you’re encoding your biases.
Not saying that language efficiency is a bunk concept, just that it’s a thorny, difficult concept to quantify. Same is true of data compression algorithms—there is no such thing as an absolute scale for Kolmogorov complexity, for the same reasons.
> If you translate it back into English, “she had said goodbye too much”, it’s clear that the real question is, “did the author mean something by those choices which the translation obliterated?”
When translating for fun, I've often run into a choice between:
- Preserving the author's meaning as literally as possible.
- Preserving the author's style.
A translation can be literally very accurate, while destroying everything that made the original work charming. Or it might preserve the feel and the flavor of the original work, but skim over a lot of the details. A really good translation captures more of both, with fewer trade-offs.
Jorge Luis Borges encouraged his translators to improve upon his original work, if possible. He worked extensively with Di Giovanni, one of his translators, debating the best way to capture certain phrases in English: https://medium.com/@michael.marcus/dear-mr-borges-which-tran... His preference was almost always to capture the "feel" of the work, rather than a strictly literal translation.
I have an odd book, which contains three copies of the same story: An original in English, a French translation, and then a translation back into English by a new translator. The French version definitely loses something, and the second English version loses a bit more. But in the second English version, there is an occasional delightful turn of phrase, something that's briefly better than the original version. Translation is hard.
Digging into "She said goodbye too many times before" versus "She said goodbye too many times", the "before" in the first implies that She is saying goodbye now.
I'm not sure if the Latin translation as it is captures that, or if you'd go for something more like "valedīxisse nimium valedīxit", "she said goodbye having said goodbye too much"; I kind of like that because then you're saying goodbye twice in the same line.
For example, the closing dialogue of the French movie À bout de souffle ("Out of breath" but given the English title Breathless) is difficult to translate to English because of the ambiguous use of "dégueulasse".
It’s hard enough to translate when there’s one meaning - but good writers often use multiple meaning of the same words - either for deeper meaning or for humor or other layered meanings.
That’s why the translations of Asterix are so impressive.
> Translation is a process which both erases information and introduces new information.
There's an essay I enjoyed by Douglas Hofstadter which is all about this, though from an artistic POV without much (any?) information science. Translator, Trader. The title itself is a fun bit of translational wordplay on "traduttore, traditore."
Brevity isn’t the only goal with language; you also want robustness under noise and ease of random access (e.g. if you skim-read a text or if you enter a conversation a bit late or have to leave early)
In an optimally breve language the meaning of a text could completely flip when a single letter/syllable/phoneme is changed. That, in turn, means listeners have to hear every letter/syllable/phoneme perfectly.
Interestingly, natural languages already have a bit of both.
As an example, if you skim-read a text and restart at “He said she wasn’t there anymore”, there are 3 ‘back references’ in that sentence that require you to look back in the text to find the meaning of.
Also, a paragraph’s meaning can change by adding the sentence “Just joking.” Or even a simple “Not.”.
The problem is that there are complex concepts that translate to a single syllable in some languages but requires a lot of context or explanation in other languages. Would these be "single instructions" or multiple? Then when you really break it down, many concepts are used grammatically but are not required based on their context. Should you count that as extraneous or not? An example is that some languages use a case system to indicate the epistemology of a statement, how the speaker knew that information (i.e. saw it first hand, heard it second hand, or saw evidence of it). Depending on the context, this may be vital or extraneous. Therefore the same statement that is "compressed" to remove useless information would be compressed two different ways. That doesn't seem feasible. All of this is to say, this sounds good in theory, but the complexities on practice are insurmountable.
> single syllable in some languages but requires a lot of context or explanation in other languages
then don't these other langs do a 'bad job' at compression ?
> That doesn't seem feasible
In general maybe not. But for some restricted 'assembly' ?
"The cat is on the table" has no ambiguity. And in some langs like Polish it compresses better : "Kot jest na stole" (Cat is on table), same info, better syllable-wise compression (5 vs 7).
"The cat" has different information in it than "kot." That same sentence also translates to "A cat is on the table," but no English speaker would say "the cat" and "a cat" have the same meaning. In fact, I can't think of a context where both sentences would be interchangeable. The listener either already knows which cat is "the cat" or would be confused. "A cat" implies an unknown cat. If you walk into your house and say "a cat is on the table," the assumption is its an unknown cat. If you say "the cat" it's most likely a pet. In some contexts that matters and some it doesn't, therefore you can't just say Polish compresses better.
From a data compression/language efficiency standpoint, both sentences in both languages actually rely on a (potentially large) amount of unstated context to sort out these ambiguities. In some languages, this context can be totally unspoken and merely known to both the speaker and the listener. This absolutely MUST be accounted for if a truly correct translation is to be made.
For instance, your assumption that the definite "the cat" is being used idiomatically like so: this sentence, used in the manner you offer, might be used in conversation might occur in a farmhouse somewhere between an old man and woman who have lived together in this house for a long time, i.e. American Gothic. There's a vast amount of shared information and a perception of very little ambiguity held by both the speaker and the listener (whether correct or mistaken!). Any of those might fail. Furthermore, to use this sentence in English unadorned by context requires that both the speaker and listener have a shared reference to _what_ cat is being referred to by the definite article, "the". This very well might come with an unambiguous default in other languages!
While that's true, anyone with a cat can tell you that their house instantly becomes a farmhouse, and they age years at a time on the spot as a result of said feline. The context is kind of a given.
Different languages "compress" different things depending on what was needed. The Qin emperor did not know of limited liability companies, due to the concept being invented several hundred years later in Europe, so Chinese writes "有限责任公司" where an English speaker would write "ltd."
Kanji look very compressed, and can convey a lot in a single character, but if there isn't one for your needs things can get ugly. Whereas English speakers find it much easier to borrow, shorten, abbreviate, or make up words for convenience.
You could measure the efficiency of a language by computing how many bits are required to store the semantics of a word/phrase/sentence losslessly. Assuming ideal encoding to bits of course. Think of things like perplexity and the like.
However, traditional way of computing efficiency of compression would not be useful for a meaningful analysis of the efficiency of a language. Barring issues like having an ideal encoding to bits, or even having the concept of "efficiency" being rigorously defined, there are problems just from the outset.
Take context for example.
All useful compression methods have some sort of decompression key involved. This could be the dictionary, or the bitmap or the know-how (for cases like RLE). In natural langauges, the compression/decompression key is stored in a distributed fashion across the minds of a society.
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is a VERY efficient compression for what is presumably a very long story about two hunters who met at an island and fought a beast together, but it is only efficient to the people who speak that language. The "local" efficiency (to the population who speak the language) is very high, but the "global" efficiency isn't.
So we must account for efficiency in terms of the size of the compressed concept as well as the compression key. And from my experience, it's a sorta lumpy kinda world out there.
> You could measure the efficiency of a language by computing how many bits are required to store the semantics of a word/phrase/sentence losslessly. Assuming ideal encoding to bits of course. Think of things like perplexity and the like.
This has been done! The answer is about 39 bits a second.
> "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is a VERY efficient compression for what is presumably a very long story about two hunters who met at an island and fought a beast together, but it is only efficient to the people who speak that language. The "local" efficiency (to the population who speak the language) is very high, but the "global" efficiency isn't.
I suppose image macros/memes are the modern equivalent. Social context enables readers to "decompress" the meme.
[Drake top]: "Two hunters who met at an island and fought a beast together"
It is customary, when comparing performance of compression algorithms, to include the size of the tool needed for decompression in the compression benchmarks, since otherwise one can simply smuggle the uncompressed data in the decompression tool.
ISTM a similar principle would need to apply here: learning the "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" language would involve absorbing many volumes of history and mythology where for the usual sort of language a dictionary, grammar reference and maybe a book of common idioms would suffice.
Whatever metric is used to compare languages for efficiency should reflect this.
You can't store "the semantics" losslessly because you can't definitively say what the semantics of an utterance even are, unless you're using some reduced definition of the term, or a pre-selected frame, or a computer language.
While some languages “compress” information into less syllables, sometimes redundancy can be a feature. For example I feel like languages like spanish have longer words, but since the intonation doesn’t vary too much, fluent speakers can speak way faster, or to put it more accurately, fast speech is more prevalent.
Similar thing I’ve noticed with the south indian language - Malayalam, just try to pronounce the name of the city - Thiruvananthapuram, local speakers would pronounce it with roughly the same speed as “London”, and would enunciate every syllable - its crazy.
Since you mentioned Malayalam, the sentence can be made into a single word in the language - vitacholliyirunnereyaval (വിടചൊല്ലിയിരുന്നേറെയവൾ). Sounds lyrical, but does it.
No magic but plain agglutination, and I am sure this should be possible in languages like Finnish too...
I'm just a hobby linguist, but I believe research has generally shown that speech information density is relatively fixed. Languages with more complex syllabic structures end up speaking slower, but they can also code more information.
My first impulse - after playing some programming/optimization games over the morning - was: Is these just one kind of efficiency for a language?
For example, mandarin or japanese can be very short on the character count. However, this increases character complexity and makes the languages harder to learn. On the other hand, large parts of english tend to be simple to learn.
I wondered what google translate would make of a dead language so I tried those phrases. Neither of them seem even close, so (as I don't speak Latin) I don't know whether the issue lies in google translate, the complexity of what's being portrayed, whether the phrases are too idiomatic, or whether these idioms would require context around them to translate correctly.
"nimium valedīxit": He got too sick
"totiēns valedīxit": He was always well
Edit: Playing around with google translate, "nim valedīxit" translates to He said goodbye. But "valedīxit" translates to Said goodbye. "Nimium" translates to Too many
So somewhere in that complexity it does seem to be that those two words have a meaning that build off eachother for their meaning, but google is considering it literally
If anyone has an explanation for these phrases rather than my guess work, I'd love to hear them!
Latin is dramatically efficient in expressing meaning because it has a grammar that is several times more complex than english. On the other hand, most of latin grammar can be thought as adding prefixes and suffixes to root words.
So it seems this is why "classical Latin" died out and "vulgar Latin" became the romance languages of today
Because while "classical Latin" was capable of doing those antics, it was limited for day to day use. Phrasal and noun endings were complicated and wouldn't play well with day to day usage
Yes it seems certain that classical Latin - and Greek - have come down to us in a written form that was fairly artificial; in Bodmer's wonderful phrasing, we can assume that "the crossword puzzles of Cicero" (ie the complex juggling about of words by relying on inflections) were eschewed in favour of a fixed word order when he was bawling out one of his slaves.
Only with context! As is seen in one comment, the pronoun is left out and just the 2 words would only say "[third person] did something". My Latin lessons were very long ago, but yeah. You'd probably declare it once per paragraph, then shorten. But in isolation this information is lost.
The same translation logic works in Finnish: “liikaa hyvästeli” is the equivalent of the Latin “nimium valedixit”.
Finnish doesn’t have gender pronouns so you can’t distinguish between he and she in most contexts. Adding that distinction in an idiomatic way would make the translation quite a bit longer.
Few tackled the problem of AI with logic. Most used lots of electricity and computation hardware to analyze everything analytical, without actually doing any analysis.
The ancient languages like Old Arabic, Old Hebrew, and Latin was the key to understanding language in general. I think Esperante might also be key to deducing language.
Usually German is just longer than a lot of other languages, more verbose.
Do you have any examples where it really excels? In my experience English is quite a good language to describe complicated things rather simple and short.
There is a mood useful especially in certain types of fiction for which German is a perfect fit. Because the most important verb in a sentence tend to be at the very end in German, it naturally creates a sense of suspense.
If you want to keep it very formal. Informally one would say something like "Trau dich, trinks!", or even shorter, "Komm, trinks!" or "Hopp, trinks!". Also depends on the exact intentions, if it were a bet, one could translate it as "Wetten dass dus nicht trinkst?", which would also state which side of the bet the speaker is on. "Herausfordern" is also more something like "challenge", as in "one knight challenging the other", less like "dare" as in "one child trying to get the other to do something".
Shortest translation that comes to my mind would be:
"Ich fordre dich zum Trunk."
Which IMO translates the original sentence pretty well. You could add a "heraus" at the end but as a native I would not say that it is necessary. Also the Word "Trunk" sounds a bit antiquated but Duden still lists it, therefore I'd say it's fair game.
The two-word phrase that was offered in the answer (nimium saepe) was actually not a full answer, it was only for "too many times". The answer actually did not, well.. answer the actual question.
In the linked answer, there's a two-word full answer phrase:
> So I would cut this down to something like nimium valedīxit or totiēns valedīxit: "she bade farewell too much before" or "she bade farewell so many times before".
While I don't know Latin, I do know Sanskrit. In Sanskrit you can say entire sentences with one word. For example "जिगमिषामि।" is a full sentence and it means "I want to go." This is possible because Sanskrit (and Latin) are highly inflected languages. The price for brevity is that now you have to remember many more forms of verbs and nouns. So nothing impressive (at least to me).
I read the linked info and the comments asking why this was upvoted and it's a good question. The liked answer feels a lot like a text version of a TikTok video. It's an interesting fact that takes very little time to read and makes us feel that we've learned something about a interesting topic outside of our expertise. A TikTok example is a video about a 'little known' fact of quantum mechanics. The linked info gives us the same type of satisfaction we would get from a TikTok, but is on Hacker News because it's presented in a more 'legitimate' way.
Yes, latin crams more meaning into each word (gender, tense ect) but that doesnt make it superior, rather different. English is generally short than french, but french remains the more exacting and clear language for communicating specific ideas.
Reducing word count is rather useless if you end up with words that are much longer.
The distinction of what a word is, is also pretty interesting to think about. When I read some old Dutch stories back in high school, I noticed the writers would glue together words that I would consider to be completely separate. The Latin word "quodsi" from the second answer is obviously a combination of "quod" and "si", two separate words, but "nimium saepe" isn't combined into "nimiumsaepe" despite Cicero often using those words together. "valedīxit" is just "vale" and "dīxit" smashed together into a single verb.
The proposed "illa nimium valedīxit" (from combining both answers, to include the stressed gender of the person in question) can be interpreted literally as "she overly goodbyesaid". You can derive the same meaning from reordering the words, but it won't sound as poetic.
I don't think English or French are more exacting and clear per se, I think that's more of a cultural thing for native speakers. Compare posh British English speakers to American English speakers; the exact same words can be used to either say something directly ("very interesting") or to hide complete disagreement behind a nice expression ("very interesting").
I wouldn't consider French to be any better or worse than English. It's just another language. Though, with the exception of the useless ^ here and there to indicate a missing s, French spelling matches pronunciation a lot better at least.
For further nitpicking: "etc." shall also end with '.' as it is the abbreviated form of "et cetera/caetera". Also, when used in an enumeration, it shall be preceded by a comma.
If we’re talking about clarity I think there’s some merit to the claim. It has tense markers that English lacks which buys you information in the conjugation about tense, gender and speaker. And unlike other Latin languages you aren’t able to drop the subject and just rely on the verb to convey it which forces clarity one could argue. You get the best of both worlds for clarity though the worst of both worlds for conjugation complexity and overall verboseness.
At least that’s my attempt to defend the GP’s statement.
English has (at least) four constructs to talk about the past: "he went", "he was going", "he has gone", and "he used to go". All four mean something clearly different. French meanwhile only has "il allait" and "il est allé" (and, technically "il alla" though nowadays that is basically only used in writing and its meaning is not clearly distinguishable from that of "il est allé").
It's easy to find examples of distinctions made by French that English doesn't make, and vice versa. That doesn't mean that either language, overall, tends to express concepts more precisely than the other.
It's a fascinating bit of information that demands minimal time to absorb and comprehend. It's a refreshing break from the usual content seen here while still being intellectually stimulating.
English can do reasonably well if you don't mind poetic sounding language (and, to be fair, Shakespeare compressed down a lot of things into shorter, poetic idioms we use today). Something like her farewells overran, perhaps.
I am not sure why I upvoted this. Perhaps because I have dealt with C, C++, Java, JavaScript and some Python. I know a smattering of French, German, Dutch, Japanese and Czech. So perhaps that too. Or perhaps because of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Aside from anything else, human language and its comprehension is an important aspect of AI, and the sheer variety among grammars is a salient feature that cannot be ignored.
