How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

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.

surgical_fire• 3 years ago

The mystery of internet points is both fascinating and inscrutable.

BoxFour• 3 years ago

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.

talkingtab• 3 years ago

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.

defrost• 3 years ago

It directly relates to the recent ETL (Extract - Transform - Load) thread patterns.

Here someone seeks to do for Maroon 5's This Love what has been done for Greenday's Boulevard of Broken Dreams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo

I look forward to near future efforts with the Sleaford Mods' Blog Maggot.

mannykannot• 3 years ago

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.

dTal• 3 years ago

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.

alcover6• 3 years ago

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.

enkid2• 3 years ago

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.

JoBrad• 3 years ago

Yes, but it’s lossy compression, so beware.

chewxy• 3 years ago

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.

jdmichal2• 3 years ago

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.

https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...

notpushkin• 3 years ago

Finally, my favourite pastime: natural language golfing!

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

Hackersnews don’t have to be programming or tech

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Lossy compression though. The songs meaning was lost because “too many times” is very important to make sense of the lyrics that follows.

throw0101c• 3 years ago

I wonder how one could measure a language efficiency.

An area of active research:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/co...

* https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingvan-2020-...

A constructed language:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

* Via: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/zyi8q/what_is_...

Doing a search for "language information entropy" also gives back a number of results.

seer• 3 years ago

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.

tetha• 3 years ago

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.

klodolph• 3 years ago

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.

Someone• 3 years ago

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.”.

low_tech_love• 3 years ago

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.

kangalioo• 3 years ago

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".

qsdf38100• 3 years ago

Are you sure? My understanding is that the two words are the full sentence.

Édit: I mean in the last paragraph of the answer.

roblabla• 3 years ago

it... did? Their final answer is:

nimium valedīxit or totiēns valedīxit: "she bade farewell too much before" or "she bade farewell so many times before".

nimium/totiēns conveying "too many times before" and "valedīxit" conveying "she said goodbye".

ace32229• 3 years ago

The top answer offers this 2 word solution: nimium valedīxit or totiēns valedīxit

nicbou• 3 years ago

German has many of those moments. It's a brilliant language for very specific uses, like user manuals.

tetris11• 3 years ago

to dare → herausfordern

    Eng: "I dare you to drink that"  
    Deu: "Ich fordere dich heraus, das zu trinken."

Almost double

andix• 3 years ago

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.

ChrisRR2• 3 years ago

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!

messe2• 3 years ago

ChatGPT does well (I gave it the additional info that the subject was female, but that will only change whether it chooses the pronoun he or she):

totiēns valedīxit: She said goodbye so many times.

nimium valedīxit: She said goodbye too much

https://chat.openai.com/share/6d564b0a-c613-4411-a656-735cd9...

mort96• 3 years ago

That seems like a google translate issue, the word "valedīcō" seems to unambiguously mean bidding farewell (or giving a farewell speech): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valedico#Latin, and valedīxit is unambiguously the "third-person singular perfect active indicative" of valedīcō (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valedixit).

qwerty456127• 3 years ago

I would also like to ask the HN folks how comes we have so smart LLMs nowadays yet still no really good machine translation to Latin.

nashashmi2• 3 years ago

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.

irrational4• 3 years ago

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”

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/6ijiuw/lon...

thaumasiotes5• 3 years ago

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".

Chris2048• 3 years ago

Couldn't you use "thus"?

orangepurple• 3 years ago

The Polish language also has an insane amount of compression. Example, "to play": https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bcthjo/conjugation_o...

coliveira• 3 years ago

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.

nashashmi2• 3 years ago

I think what makes Latin so succinct are the 48 forms of a verb. And the 5 forms a of a noun just in singular form.

raverbashing• 3 years ago

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

tragomaskhalos2• 3 years ago

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.

Vt71fcAqt7• 3 years ago

"she farewelled excessively"

pavlov• 3 years ago

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.

smaddox• 3 years ago

Roughly the same number of syllables, though.

wink• 3 years ago

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.

tonetheman• 3 years ago

It pleases me greatly that there is a latin stackexchange.

FrustratedMonky• 3 years ago

Would Latin GPT come up with that 2 word phrase?

tmalsburg22• 3 years ago

GPT4 response:

  You can translate the phrase "She said goodbye too many times before" into Latin as "Dixit vale saepe nimis antea".

I asked GPT4 whether it could make the translation shorter to which it responded that Latin was inherently a verbose language, so no.

z2• 3 years ago

For what it's worth, I asked the same two questions to GPT 3.5 and got:

Yes, in Latin, you can say "multum vale" to mean "goodbye many times" or "vale nimis" to mean "goodbye too much"

sandworm1012• 3 years ago

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.

lgeorget• 3 years ago

[citation needed]?!

OtomotO• 3 years ago

Nitpick: it's etc for et cetera

sandworm1012• 3 years ago

And sentences generally end with periods, or release from confinement.

masswerk• 3 years ago

It's "&c" – Latin ligatures are important, especially in a thread like this! ;-)

vgalin• 3 years ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_cetera

stinos• 3 years ago

One could also say that French is 'rather different', not better or more clear. Let alone superior (though I do not know where that claim came from).

anbende• 3 years ago

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.

mbg7215• 3 years ago

A side effect of that cramming is that word order doesn't affect meaning as much as in e.g. English, which makes poetry and wordplay different.

umanwizard3• 3 years ago

french remains the more exacting and clear language for communicating specific ideas.

/r/badlinguistics nonsense.

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

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.

tail_exchange6• 3 years ago

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).

bitdivision4• 3 years ago

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?

tail_exchange6• 3 years ago

It can be used for both. A better translation for it would be "excessively".

lopis• 3 years ago

You lost the gender of the person though, which from my understanding is preserved in Latin with a verb suffix.

tail_exchange6• 3 years ago

That is true. It could also be used by a "he", so there is a bit of ambiguity.

hgsgm3• 3 years ago

How very postmodern.

vlz• 3 years ago

I think you got that wrong, "valedixit" is just third person perfect, "he/she/it said goodbye", the verb suffix does not encode gender.

jjtheblunt• 3 years ago

it is not encoded in the verb ending.

Vox_Leone3• 3 years ago

My shot >> Illa dixit vale multis temporibus

(*) if you drop the pronoun you can even sing the Latin lyrics on the same division. :)

In colloquial pt_BR that would be 'Ela disse adeus muitas vezes [antes]'

Zecc• 3 years ago

Can't really speak for colloquial pt_BR, but wouldn't that be "demasiadas" instead of "muitas"?

ajuc4• 3 years ago

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

Metacelsus• 3 years ago

Polish "za" has so many uses, it's really mind-boggling (as someone learning Polish)

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

Interesting, 'wiele' seems to be a distant cousin to the dutch 'veel' by way of 'viele' (German). More so because 'w' is pronounced as 'v'.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 years ago

You can do the same thing in English.

She said bye often.

5 syllables.

elliottkember• 3 years ago

"often" and "too many times" do not have the same meaning at all

Lio3• 3 years ago

I realise it's from song lyrics so doesn't have to make sense but this instinctively scans as poor grammar to me.

Shouldn't it be "she'd" past tense?

Otherwise it's just someone saying "goodbye too many times before" and someone who'd previously said "goodbye" more than is acceptable.

...I'm almost certainly overthinking this but I'd wager that tense error is important when translating to Latin.

It's like reading XML where someone's left out a closing tag. :P

ses1984• 3 years ago

Doesn’t adding the ‘d change it from past tense to passive voice past tense?

Lio3• 3 years ago

I honestly don't know but to me it sounds like present tense.

I'd be interested to know though. It just reads as ...wrong to me.

I guess it might be an English dialect thing.

thfuran• 3 years ago

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.

whimsicalism5• 3 years ago

Not sure, but the phrasing without 'd reads as off to me, a native english speaker.

jraph2• 3 years ago

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)

prosody• 3 years ago

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.

benrutter• 3 years ago

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.

Majromax• 3 years ago

"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.

jakear2• 3 years ago

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.

bloak• 3 years ago

Shouldn't it be "she'd" past tense?

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".

da39a3ee3• 3 years ago

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).

singron• 3 years ago

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.

whimsicalism5• 3 years ago

I don't know, as a speaker of American english to me it sounds wrong without "she'd."

"Did you already do it?" sounds perfectly normal to me on the other hand.

DeTheBug2• 3 years ago

You can do something similar with Arabic, I can think of few ways to squeeze it into 4~2 words phrase (variations) without sacrificing clarity

ClaraForm• 3 years ago

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.

DeTheBug2• 3 years ago

Oh no I was not talking about slangs, this can be like

ودعت كثيرا

قالت وداعا كثيرا

ودعت مرارا

I'm Iraqi but I'm by no means an Arabic expert, I'm pretty sure there is a better way to give a more accurate expression for this in Arabic

pizzafeelsright• 3 years ago

Her goodbye's a lie.

She lies goodbye.

Oft repeated, her exits depleted.

alcover6• 3 years ago

syllable count

  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.

self_awareness3• 3 years ago

polish 7 (8) - Zbyt często się (już) żegnała

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:

7 - Za często już żegnała

sznio• 3 years ago

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.

erremerre• 3 years ago

Spanish:

Despidiose excesivamente. 10

alcover6• 3 years ago

Does this not lack the 'before then' nuance ?

jiofj• 3 years ago

That's too lossy, and "despidiose" is trying too hard.

grokkedit• 3 years ago

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

tail_exchange6• 3 years ago

You can reduce "demasiadamente" to just "demais". I realized later that I was being silly. That would be 7 syllables.

dejj• 3 years ago

Literal Code Golf.

oblio• 3 years ago

Romanian:

Ea și-a luat adio de prea multe ori (înainte = before, optional).

Ea și-a luat adio excesiv.

Ea și-a luat adio prea mult.

vladb38b• 3 years ago

Si-a luat ramas bun deja adeseori.

niyaven• 3 years ago

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.

r0b1n5• 3 years ago

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.

bitcurious• 3 years ago

If you cheat a little you’d say “she said goodbye too many times” and leave before implied in English also. But then the song wouldn’t sound as good.

hnbad• 3 years ago

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.

hashar• 3 years ago

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.

bambax• 3 years ago

Elle salua excessivement avant

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.

seszett• 3 years ago

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.

nicolaslegland• 3 years ago

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).

Change my French mind.

jraph2• 3 years ago

Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent

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.

umanwizard3• 3 years ago

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.

oneshtein• 3 years ago

In Ukrainian: 9 - «прощавалася забагато»

tragomaskhalos2• 3 years ago

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).

marcodiego• 3 years ago

The most natural translation in modern Portuguese is "Ela disse adeus vezes demais antes."

ajuc4• 3 years ago

I'd skip "się" and reverse the word order. "Żegnała za często" sounds better and more poetic ;)

If you want to include "before" (which Lating skipped): "Żegnała już za często"

TheMatten• 3 years ago

    slovak
    7 - Priveľa sa lúčila
    8 (with "before"/"already") - Priveľa sa už lúčila

monster_group• 3 years ago

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).

screamingninja• 3 years ago

I find it highly impressive, but that's just me.

xdennis• 3 years ago

That's nothing, in Nuxalk, clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' means "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant".

It's a single word sentence with no vowels, pronounced as [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ] (see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3%CA%B7%C... ).

It's formed from: xł- (“have”) + p̓x̣ʷłt (“bunchberry”) + -łp (“plant”) + -łł (pluperfect marker) + -s (possessive marker) + kʷc̓ (of uncertain function)

nihiven• 3 years ago

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.

bitdivision4• 3 years ago

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.

0: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

avgcorrection• 3 years ago

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.

bitdivision4• 3 years ago

Yes, I agree, Spanish is generally more verbose.

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?

academia_hack3• 3 years ago

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.

leephillips• 3 years ago

What an amazing comment. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this.

bshimmin• 3 years ago

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).

Jun8• 3 years ago

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....

haste410• 3 years ago

Each verb on the first line has a "mate" on the second.

Can you clarify what a "mate" is? What determines a word's "mate"? The position on the line? Their meaning?

viciousvoxel2• 3 years ago

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.

sharikous• 3 years ago

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

saaaaaam2• 3 years ago

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?

lynguist3• 3 years ago

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.

academia_hack3• 3 years ago

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.

ToDougie• 3 years ago

Incredible post, I really appreciate you taking the time to share.

Are there any resources that you have enjoyed over the years for learning Latin or engaging in material written in Latin?

karaterobot• 3 years ago

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.

sul_tasto• 3 years ago

this is a great resource https://geoffreysteadman.com/

leoc• 3 years ago

If you listen to some podcasts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNbsJ-QimQo you should hopefully be able to maintain your Latin.

ruune• 3 years ago

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

nickspacek• 3 years ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17

ak_111• 3 years ago

I think two words also in arabic : ودعتنا تكرار

denton-scratch2• 3 years ago

The original English is ungrammatical, or at least incomplete; it helps a bit if you start from grammatical English.

So first alter it to "She HAD said goodbye too many times before". Then it's essier to translate correctly.

wunderland• 3 years ago

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.

denton-scratch2• 3 years ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect

burkaman• 3 years ago

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.

jackcosgrove• 3 years ago

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.

tuomosipola• 3 years ago

When I was the president of the society of Latin students, I got several emails asking for tattoo translations. I hope I got them right.

justinator• 3 years ago

Let’s hope not- Maroon 5’s songwriting is not known to be… good.

sandyarmstrong• 3 years ago

That was my first thought as well. Ah, to be young again!

lr4444lr2• 3 years ago

People trusting the advice of a stranger over email to permanently etch their skin? What a world...

resolutebat• 3 years ago

If you think Latin tattoos are bad, check out the kind of shit people get tattooed with in (what they think is) Chinese:

https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/

NooneAtAll32• 3 years ago

I'd probably bet on Latin cover

like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbEKIW3pUUk

Tao33002• 3 years ago

Maroon 5 lyrics in Latin and Unicode Ghost Kanjis. Midlife crisis, here I come!

JTbane• 3 years ago

Maroon V?

da39a3ee3• 3 years ago

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.

leke• 3 years ago

My favourite part was - Saves valuable chisel time.

bertil• 3 years ago

A clear reference to 'lapidārius/um', an explicit quality of speakers, and meaning literally that.

exitb• 3 years ago

Is that a way an actual native speaker would phrase it, or is it just Latin golf that would sound out of place?

hgsgm3• 3 years ago

That's what the question is trying to figure out

Actual native speakers are all dead. It's poetry, not conversational. The answers looked to poets.

penguin_booze• 3 years ago

For a change of scenery, here's your Latin 101: https://youtu.be/0lczHvB3Y9s.

fillipvt• 3 years ago

In Spanish this would look like "dijo adiós demasiado". Although unsure how to fit the "before" without being too literal.

VikingCoder3• 3 years ago

How am I the first person here to uselessly link to the Latin Lesson scene from the Life of Brian?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjOfQfxmTLQ

prerok• 3 years ago

I was learning Latin at the time I watched that movie. Fell off the sofa, laughing, during that scene :)

Tao33002• 3 years ago

Nothing better captures the feeling of being put on the spot by ones Latin teacher.

VikingCoder3• 3 years ago

How would you translate this into Latin?

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

20 GOTO 10

...

X SCRIBE "SALVE MUNDI"

XX ITE X

or something like that?

eindiran• 3 years ago

That reminds me of this: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Lingua_abstrusa

schoen2• 3 years ago

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!

VikingCoder3• 3 years ago

So...?

X SCRIBE "SALVE MUNDE"

XX I X

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

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.

digging2• 3 years ago

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."

viraptor• 3 years ago

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

lampiaio• 3 years ago

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?".

haberman• 3 years ago

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.

JohnBooty• 3 years ago

    "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.

naishin• 3 years ago

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.

Obscurity4340• 3 years ago

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.

murphyslaw• 3 years ago

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.

lr4444lr2• 3 years ago

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.

galangalalgol• 3 years ago

Idiomatic enough that I, as a native speaker, didn't understand what was intended by the phrase outside of context.

whimsicalism5• 3 years ago

As a native english speaker, I feel like "She'd said goodbye too many times before" better conveys the meaning for me.

jacksnipe• 3 years ago

Sure, but then it’s no longer the lyrics to a Maroon 5 song.

digging2• 3 years ago

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.

Karellen2• 3 years ago

Some instances of "had" can be elided without loss of meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h...

Kind of like that that can be similarly strange

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_that_is_is_that_that_is_n...

whimsicalism5• 3 years ago

I'm not at all an expert on grammar, just know what sounds right to my ear. Can you more explicitly connect the 'had had' sentence to this example?

uptownfunk• 3 years ago

Imagine if we had this much attention paid to other Classical languages.

teleforce• 3 years ago

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].

[1] Grammar school:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_school

[2] List of grammar schools in England:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...

[3] Grammar School Statistics:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...

jltsiren2• 3 years ago

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.

canjobear• 3 years ago

Understanding Latin was absolutely the goal of grammar schools in the time when most written educated discourse happened in Latin.

jrflowers• 3 years ago

“Maroon 5” delenda est

jll29• 3 years ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPpTgCho5ZA

How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

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